Down the Blog Hole
Almost all blogs are organized chronologically, kind of like the news ticker in Times Square. They focus on what’s newest, and anything that’s old is relegated to the black hole known as the “Archives”.
This is a shame because a lot of the most interesting and insightful writing on blogs has long-lasting value. For instance, here’s a great article on search engine optimization, but it’s buried under ‘General’. It would have been nice to find this a few weeks ago when I was actually looking for information on this topic.
Compare how blogs are structured this to traditional, “Web 1.0″ style content sites, which nearly always include a hierarchy of categories and subcategories. The best blogs do this, and offer multiple ways to find postings. Apartment Therapy, for example, does a good job of categorizing by stores, services, house tours, and other topics.
Search engines offer little help. Technorati generally returns an irrelevant batch of results, sorted by date, with no concept of relevancy or page rank. Google searches the entire web, returning a giant mishmash of results. There’s no way to express the fact that I’m searching for information as opposed to products or businesses. Hopefully the search engines will step up to the challenge and make the wealth of information in blog archives easier to find.
