The majority of websites of the ‘old web’ (1990’s) were hand crafted, highly customized places where creators acted more as librarians—carefully maintaining a table of contents and some evergreen content. This all changed with the introduction of Moveable Type, a CMS that took the labor out of publishing content and democratized a minimal, organized, aesthetic.
As a result of Moveable Type, reverse chronological content (blogging) became the majority of the web. This stemmed from the constraints of the software (only one way to sort content), but the effect was profound. A table of contents was replaced with a feed of content. It was far easier to publish new content so that’s what people did.
See also:
- How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy which discusses how blogging caused the end of the ‘old web’
- The Garden and the Stream talks about the Stream as replacing topology (old web) with serialization (blogging, social media)
Links to this note
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On the Modern Web, the Absence of Recent Activity Greatly Diminishes Value
Due to the consumerist nature of the modern web, we expect a perpetual stream of activity from web content. For example, going to someone’s personal blog and seeing the last post was 2 years ago leaves the impression that it is not relevant and abandoned so it must not have been that good. Another example is open source software. The dreaded ‘Still alive?’ issue implies that the value we assign to something we can consume on the internet is proportional to the frequency it is updated.
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Adding Dates to Content Provides Contextual Value Only When the Content Is Not Evergreen
Adding dates to content like a blog post provides value when the content can best be understood by the relationship with when the content was created. Otherwise having a ‘Posted on: yyyy-mm-dd’ does little more than to signal there is activity here and that you are the kind of person that writes regularly.
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Effects of Note Blogging on SEO
Since I started publishing my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve noticed a large change in overall search engine traffic. My personal site and notes have doubled in impressions and clicks. Notably I receive more impressions from search engine visitors than I do from tweets from my Twitter account.