Just a thought.
The present: Most people come to you via a search engine (probably through Google, although Yahoo! is on the return). Some people come via Technorati, Bloglines or other RSS feed engine. And some are family, friends, co-workers, affiliates, … the people you meet in real life. All 6 of them. 
Given the state of current search engines, they’re stumbling over one another for the largest and fastest index, and the state of the ‘distributed web’ via RSS services (*cough web 2.0*). Does it really matter whether your site is in ’shape’, a.k.a. designed? What matters these days is crawlability and indexability. In fact with add-ons like GreaseMonkey you cannot even be sure that your visitors will see what you’ve intended. Shuther to think what you’ll break when you update your site for someone running a GreaseMonkey script.
The future: Here’s my thought. What if? I’ll just revert to HTML 2.0. Google & Co understands it very well. And instead of chronological blogging or filling my web space, I’ll just put up thoughts and keep on writing on them totally visibly for you.
Hold up. That’s called a wiki!
Yes. 
But think of it. What’s so different from a blog? Blog (and forum) people put up ‘updated’-tags in their posts to signal a change. So what if I don’t have to care about that? I’m thinking cross-over wiki/weblog. Just let me write, note, jot, expand, figure out, take a sidestep, draw, video-tape it or just delete. And you, my audience, all 6 of you, could comment in the proceedings? You know, just like a weblog. You’re probably saying OPML? No, from what I’ve seen it’s not what I want.
Come to think of it. It’s much like building your own personal Wikipedia, pinging around whenever I press a button (feeds), having a sitemap so search engines (G. Sitemaps) are filled with their hunger, put up an OPML to keep mister Winer happy, put up a webservice/API so every webdeveloper can rehash my content on their mobile, … Who cares about my site? It’s about distributing it.
Like I said, just a thought.
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3 Responses to “Just a thought.”
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Michael Arrington Says:
August 24th, 2005 at 8:33 amThis post made me think about a conversation I had with Ross Mayfied at Bar Camp. Wiki’s and blogs are “kissing cousins” and more alike than different. You should expand on these thoughts.
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Caspar Says:
August 25th, 2005 at 3:20 pmAnd I will… maybe first I need to make a ‘feature’ comparison between wiki & weblogs (& forums & cms & …).
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Caspar Says:
August 26th, 2005 at 1:05 amFunny, I see Gapingvoid doing this already. It may be because it’s just that he hasn’t got any time on his hands to make a full post these days. But in Bloglines his same posts appear 3 times in a row. Everytime a little expanded. But he doesn’t bother putting ‘updated’ tags in.
(That’s probably not what you want…)