packing

I'm trying to demonstrate that a lot of topics packed in one location - a blog - is actually more effective than if they were all carefully segregated into their own locations.

The organizing principle becomes time, that is, location, and not topicality, and within that framework we can move so efficiently from one item to the next that even if we need to do that dozens of times it's easier than explaining to the computer what we are looking for. It also has other interesting effects.

Sorting posts, which are little pages, into categories is not an uninteresting problem, in fact it is probably essential, and the more fundamental problem is how to move visitors from one category to another efficiently, but I am forced to dispense with categories, here, by the technology. It is interesting to note, however, that the categories now emerge organically from the flow of posts in a way that beats a collection of blogs hands down.

Part of the reason this is so much better is that categories of information don't exist in isolation from each other.

I object to search and labels as the dominant paradigm for navigating the Web on the grounds that they reduce the complexity of the mix of observations that constitute an actual theory of existence. They accidentally isolate data from its context in reality, which is definitely a power, but the other power, accident, needs to be liberated.

Let us call search and topical blogs automated navigation. The effect that is produced today on this blog of images flashing if we scroll through the blog results from my decision to strip away automation and leave the reader with one obvious tool for navigating the posts, the scroll bar. It is a kind of iconization, where posts are compressed not in space, as in thumbnails, or conceptually, as in labels, but in time. You see each post for an instant, and can say, looking for something in particular, or some type of thing, "nope, nope, nope, yup." The effect resembles casual browsing, an entertainment function, but it is no distraction, rather it is a denumbing, and it is also simply reality. It is an addition of complexity which adds stability. The effect is so profound that, for all its complexity and randomness, it overwhelms attempts to simplify the problem, in terms of efficiency - and without obviating those other options, either.

I wrote earlier about how I want Blogger to treat a blog as one continuous stream of posts and not to divide them up in any way, so that when I link you to a post, and you follow that link, you will see the post plus, above it, later posts, below it, earlier ones. From there you can scroll up or down and see more later and earlier posts, which constitutes exploring events around the time of the post, or, in one word, orientation. In two words it's reference points. But this does present certain technical challenges. I am at this moment having a ton of fun thinking about how those need to be handled.