

The Blog Timestamp is Dying - champion
http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/

======
ezy
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.

~~~
champion
I have mixed feelings about it. I certainly think it is helpful to know when
something with published for the context you mean. I think it also probably
makes sense to lead less with it for content that isn't that time-sensitive.

The broader point is that I think people will organize their content less
around timestamps and more around relevance, the reader, etc.

~~~
ott2
You cannot know whether the date the content was published will be relevant
for a reader or not. It is not your assessment of timeliness that matters, but
the reader's. So in the interest of doing the right thing, don't obscure the
date.

------
DjangoReinhardt
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.

YMMV. Discussions and arguments are welcome. Name-calling will be ignored.
Trolls will not be fed.

\----------

> Downplaying the timestamp attempts to make the content appear more
> evergreen.

This is dangerous.

Imagine a newbie developer landing on one of your old posts looking for
directions on something. Unfortunately for her, there isn'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'd be putting them through because they tried to follow
your directions and failed miserably?

Before you claim it to be an edge-case, I've fallen prey to the same situation
many times in my search for such elusive knowledge.

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't need to change ever? You aren't fooling me,
rather, you are fooling yourself.

> RSS is dying.

RSS isn't dying, sorry.

Tracking google search trends isn'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't search for it everyday, do they?

The consumption of RSS has changed, though.

Until a few years ago, feeds used to be the ONLY way to consume RSS. Then
mashups happened. Then APIs became ubiquitous. PubSubHubbub, JSON & JSONP have
flourished in recent times. All of these were 'derived' (in a broad sense)
from RSS.

Oh, and before you point to Google Reader, allow me to make an anticipatory
point. Google shut down Reader because they didn'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
'death' of RSS?

Almost every site out there, that updates regularly maintains a feed. Except
Twitter, of course. But then, Twitter implementing an RSS feed isn't adding
much anyway. Their existing consumption patterns and the ecosystem around them
is robust enough to do without RSS and Atom feeds.

If anything, I agree that RSS is very unidirectional, but that's where I
believe PubSubHubbub can make a difference. In fact, if I may be so bold, I'd
say that RSS is evolving and PubSubHubbub is one of its evolutionary
intermediates.

With the insane number of consumption platforms and our burning desire to
instantly know everything, I wouldn't be surprised if, sooner or later,
someone finds a new way to consume RSS & Atom feeds.

I have already begun this process for myself by building @updt_me - I now
consume all my RSS & Atom feeds through Twitter. Yeah, that was a plug but
hey, it also happens to be extremely relevant.

