Blogs Can Be Better Without Timestamps

This is what I learned by read­ing Chris Pearson’s blog and notic­ing that there are no time­stamps for arti­cles and com­ments there. This goes against the stan­dard prac­tice and works per­fectly. The rea­son is quite obvi­ous after a closer look. Once you mark con­tent with dates, it gets stig­ma­tized. Instead of focus­ing on the mer­its of an arti­cle, read­ers start to judge it by the time it was pub­lished. Surely, some­thing writ­ten two years ago has to be out­dated, hasn’t it?

Wrong. The value of con­tent lies in itself, not in when it was con­ceived. Sometimes when I look at things I wrote many years ago, they strike me as bet­ter than some parts of what I write today or at least as some­thing I could not come up with presently (because I lost inter­est in the sub­ject, for exam­ple). There is no rea­son for me to dis­re­gard them only because they were writ­ten when I was much younger. Most of them could be pub­lished today with no harm to their value.

This is how “The Rust Belt” must work. Whatever I write here needs to stay rel­e­vant as long as pos­si­ble. Technically it is still a blog but the struc­ture (or the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture if you will) needs to mir­ror the premise of long term rel­e­vance. It will evolve to counter the usual way blogs and fre­quently mod­i­fied web­sites are built. No time­stamps, no monthly archives. Instead, the kind of links and struc­ture that encour­age users to fol­low the short­est paths to the most valu­able content.