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May 15, 2003
Minitrue
A recent dialogue with Dave made me realize something about the world of blogs: as a blogger, one has the power to alter history. Granted, for most blogs, the history is limited and affects relatively few people, but because of the "linkable" nature of the WWW, revisions can lead to inconsistencies, and even confusion amongst bloggers. Let me illustrate with an example (my apologies to Dave for putting him on the spot).
Dave's May 13, 2003 post originally read:
Okay- Here are the cities I plan to visit on my trip I'm currently dubbing The Great North American Tour. The problem with the title is that it isn't entirely accurate, as I'm not going to Mexico. Must revise.
He implied, erroneously, that had he planned to visit Mexico, the title would be appropriate. I responded in yesterday's post with a geography lesson. Dave's response was to amend his post --after the fact-- adding "et al" after the word "Mexico".
I'm not bringing this up to point out Dave's perceived geographical shortcomings, rather to show how bloggers can alter history. My comments in yesterday's entry about the number of North American countries no longer make sense to any readers who didn't see Dave's original comment.
So, how and when is it appropriate to amend, correct, or delete content in a weblog? In my opinion, the only changes one should
(nay, must) make to previous entries are to correct spelling mistakes and repair (or eliminate) dead links. All other changes should
be explicitly marked as additions and/or deletions. So how does one do this?
Well, as any self-respecting web designer knows, there are two (semantically correct) HTML
tags created for this purpose: <ins> and <del>
(I'm currently retrofitting this site with said tags).
But does anyone really care or am I just being particularly anal about this? Any of you who know me personally know the answer. But this certainly affects readers of RSS feeds (yes, I'll eventually join that bandwagon). So to make your feed readers, blog readers and linkers (and most of all me) happy, stop the Orwellian rewriting of history.