Friday, October 11, 2002

doctypes Don't Out Me, Robert, Please!? Robert Scoble is on a validation rant: Back to Kottke. His site doesn't validate either. Hmm, should we "out" people who make sites that don't even have a doc type? I'm thinking that we should, especially when they are putting themselves out there as design gods. [The Scobleizer Weblog] I think it is a reasonable expectation that well-designed sites include the doc type, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a retrofit of all old pages as a condition of not being "outted". Whaddya say, Robert? Grandfather clause? (After all, I am one...a grandfather, that is.) 3:38:51 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Size of Blog Entries? Yesterday, I tweaked Robert Scoble a bit for the length of some of the stuff he posts that I get through his RSS feed via Radio. Then this morning I wrote a longish piece myself on chronological order in blogs. Does anyone have any thoughts to share on how long a blog entry out to be at a maximum? I've generally preferred to keep my posts in the range of one to four relatively short paragraphs plus the quotation from which I'm citing. I don't always do that, but I try. For longer stuff, I write a story, then post a succinct (and hopefully enticing) summary or tease in the blog itself. 11:13:35 AM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Chronology and Blogging Real-Time Events Earlier this week, I tried an experiment and blogged a baseball game in real time. I did it using mail-to-weblog capabilities because my Radio runs on my desktop which was in another room of the house from the TV where I was watching the game. Several people responded favorably to the idea and had nice things to say about the approach. But as I revisited those posts this morning, I realized that the reverse chronological order of a blog doesn't lend itself to covering real-time events like sports and meetings and conferences. This is particularly true, I think, with sports where I might not want to read the final outcome or result before I've read the insights and analysis the blogger posted in real time. This characeristic also makes blogging an unusable vehicle for story-telling, at least in the conventional beginning-middle-end sense, without either having just one post comprise the story or using the "Story" feature of Radio and providing a brief link. One could, of course, simply write the story in component parts and then post them in reverse chronlogy so that the reversed reverasl would be sequential. Seems kinda ugly, though, even to describe! What do you think? 11:10:59 AM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

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