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The Blog Timestamp is Dying

8 pointsby championover 11 years ago

2 comments

ezyover 11 years ago
I was hoping that the author would be complaining about this, but they didn't. That is unfortunate. The date something was written is a very important part of its context. This is one thing newspapers get right, and a lot of "web journalism" gets very very wrong. I've noticed this more and more as the web gets older and older -- I want to know the date something was published, and that information is really hard to come by a lot of the time.
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DjangoReinhardtover 11 years ago
TL;DR: A small rant about why I find most of the points in the blog shallow, misleading, dangerous and downright doomsday-ish at times.<p>YMMV. Discussions and arguments are welcome. Name-calling will be ignored. Trolls will not be fed.<p>----------<p>&gt; Downplaying the timestamp attempts to make the content appear more evergreen.<p>This is dangerous.<p>Imagine a newbie developer landing on one of your old posts looking for directions on something. Unfortunately for her, there isn&#x27;t any other relevant material available anywhere else on the web. Also, whatever you wrote in that post was was relevant only for a few weeks after it was written. Can you imagine the anguish you&#x27;d be putting them through because they tried to follow your directions and failed miserably?<p>Before you claim it to be an edge-case, I&#x27;ve fallen prey to the same situation many times in my search for such elusive knowledge.<p>Personally, this is one of the reason I HATE the non-availability of time-stamps, especially on tech blogs. What the hell are you trying to say? That your code is perfect and won&#x27;t need to change ever? You aren&#x27;t fooling me, rather, you are fooling yourself.<p>&gt; RSS is dying.<p>RSS isn&#x27;t dying, sorry.<p>Tracking google search trends isn&#x27;t a good way to measure how popular RSS - or anything, for that matter - is. A simple explanation could be that because more people know about RSS today than a few years ago, searching for it is no longer necessary. Almost everyone knows about Hurricane Katrina, but they don&#x27;t search for it everyday, do they?<p>The consumption of RSS has changed, though.<p>Until a few years ago, feeds used to be the ONLY way to consume RSS. Then mashups happened. Then APIs became ubiquitous. PubSubHubbub, JSON &amp; JSONP have flourished in recent times. All of these were &#x27;derived&#x27; (in a broad sense) from RSS.<p>Oh, and before you point to Google Reader, allow me to make an anticipatory point. Google shut down Reader because they didn&#x27;t find it worth the effort to monetize - it had nothing to do with the consumption of RSS. Even till the very last day, there were people clamoring for Google to continue or hunting for a suitable GReader replacement. In what way does that strike you as the &#x27;death&#x27; of RSS?<p>Almost every site out there, that updates regularly maintains a feed. Except Twitter, of course. But then, Twitter implementing an RSS feed isn&#x27;t adding much anyway. Their existing consumption patterns and the ecosystem around them is robust enough to do without RSS and Atom feeds.<p>If anything, I agree that RSS is very unidirectional, but that&#x27;s where I believe PubSubHubbub can make a difference. In fact, if I may be so bold, I&#x27;d say that RSS is evolving and PubSubHubbub is one of its evolutionary intermediates.<p>With the insane number of consumption platforms and our burning desire to instantly know everything, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if, sooner or later, someone finds a new way to consume RSS &amp; Atom feeds.<p>I have already begun this process for myself by building @updt_me - I now consume all my RSS &amp; Atom feeds through Twitter. Yeah, that was a plug but hey, it also happens to be extremely relevant.