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Does it trouble you—the rules of insider blogging? I predict irony for this LiveJournal post. After being heavily linked, it will vanish into obscurity as punishment for having a timestamp.

In the blogger-oriented parts of the Web, recency is the universal quick-and-dirty substitute for relevance. BloggerWeb tools always sort information by recency; once items get old past a certain point, they are buried in heaps of older entries, condemned to the oblivion of too-many-clicks-to-find-it-again. Unless you read and respond fast enough, you risk trying to have a conversation with an empty room long after everyone else has left the party. I suspect that all this emphasis on the short term leads to an ignorance of the long-term past. The faster you add items to a blog, the faster each individual item expires. The more blogs you aggregate, the faster each individual item gets forgotten. The faster you dump information into your brain, the faster it falls out. Maybe spending so much time shoving in short-term items even starts to elbow out long-term memory after a while.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. I’d like to think we’ve got some good stuff here on RedHanded, but I wish it were organized better. Ultimately, it’s the same with Ruby-Talk. What can I give you?

Imagine a Ruby-Talk where we could tag and rank posts. Do we really need a taxonomy, though? Can we go simpler? What is the duck typing of free tagging? We’ve got to find that!

I spend gads of time on LiveJournal. (But primarily because I’m fascinated by the Encyclopedia Brown / Bugs Meany or the Neville Longbottom / Darth Vader of verywrongslash. Kkhekhe!)