ON BLOGS STUCK IN A RUT

FROZEN IN TIME

(UPDATE BELOW)

Om Malik is launching a second blog titled "The Daily Om", supplementing his primary "GigaOm" blog, a long-time staple for innumerable tech-fans like yours truly. 

As he explains it, the second blog is for shorter, daily musings that don't fit the tenor and focus of his primary blog, which is  primarily about broadband, wireless, and VOIP-related matters.

As Om puts it, others have felt a similar need:

"Michael Arrington pointed out that he had faced the same quandary and that prompted him to start CrunchNotes, as an accompanying blog to his main property, Tech Crunch."

Indeed, blogging pioneer Dave Winer has his Scripting News  for short, quick, bursty posts, and his WordPress blog for his longer posts.

Om then makes a comment that most resonated with me:

"I feel sooner or later, many of us who are addicted to blogging, will have to set up the equivalent of Page 3 on their blogs."

This statement compelled me to write this post. 

In the year that I've been blogging in a daily basis, I've also felt the need for an alternative page where I could have shorter, pithier posts, focused perhaps on a broader range of subjects.

But I didn't want to do it with a separate blog.  It felt like a greater burden both on me in terms of maintaining a separate blog, and for readers to have to track yet another blog in their feeds.

Instead, I've long wondered how great it would be if my current blogging platform Typepad (a part of Six Apart) or someone else like Google's Blogger, Wordpress etc., offered more flexible and alternative ways to present content in different forms within the same blog.

In many ways, the blogging platforms companies have offered blogging templates that have essentially been frozen in time since blogs were first conceived. 

Sure, there's been a ton of innovation in adding bells and whistles like RSS feeds, tags, integrated paid-search systems and the like.  And every one of the companies offers different colors and themes in setting up a blog.  But the basic format of a blog has remained unchanged. 

For instance, why can't we have a blog template with the ability to have multiple tabbed pages? Then Om could have a page 1,2 and 3.

I mean if newspapers and magazines can have multiple pages, why can't blogs?

And then, how about offering different ways to present content within those pages than the standard headline, sub-headline, post approach?   Why can't we have headline-less short bits of text if we wanted or a streaming ticker tape for content we want to high-light?  What if we wanted to feature specific posts that readers particularly liked on a separate page, thus giving those pieces an extended "Shelf-life"?

One of the reasons services like MySpace have taken off is that they gave users a ton of flexibility in the ways that each user could customize the presentation of their content.

On the blogging side, we seem to be stuck in a rut in the way we think about what a blog should look like.  Perhaps we're stuck by the word "Blog" itself.

We need to break out of the strait-jacketed approach to blogs to date and think more out of the Blog box.  It feels like we're overdue for some change.

UPDATE 2.17.06:  There have been several creative suggestions on how today's blog infrastructure can be tweaked and morphed into doing some of the things I talk about in this post, both in the comments below and on other blogs like Zoli Erdos' blog here.

And these are valid approaches to accomplishing some of these goals.  I still believe that there needs to be easier, mainstream solutions that non-geeky users can use without much of a learning ramp.

Also, Anil Dash of Six Apart/Typepad has some additional input on their software's capabilities in the comment below.

Comments

[John Cox]

There are tools out there such as Xaraya and Drupal which will do exactly what you want, and much more. Both have the traditional blog tools (comments, trackbacks, etc). The problem is when you get into the realm of content management rather than blogging tools there is a time cost of customization (both are free as in beer in terms of money). Both packages are attracted to a more development oriented rather than user oriented crowd.

They allow much greater customization, but at the cost of having to piddle with them yourself to get them to do what you want, rather than a point and click interface. Worth a look, when you have some free time.

[Mary-Ann Horley]

WordPress can do it, but it involves more coding than most people would do. Perhaps I'll release a tutorial or theme if people think they'd use it.

[Anil]

Movable Type's long offered the ability to do this (I had a link blog for years, kottke.org does it well today) but of course it could be easier to do. I think with the new class of plugins like RightFields, this will be more common for MT users.

On TypePad, I think it's a natural evolution of features like the Links and Notes Typelists, which already offer a lot of this functionality.

[Murali]

Hi mp,

On your point of adding short bits of headline less text into the blog, WordPress using K2 theme allows you to do exactly that with a concept called Asides. You just post with the category Asides and bham ... you seem them in your sidebar instead of the main blog. I find it useful to comment on Cricket matches in progress which dont quite fit into the theme of my blog

On another note, wish you would stop using Caps for your titles ... kinda hurts the eye and you know what cyberspace feels about using caps right ?

[Stephane Rodriguez]

If you change the basic blog structure, only because you'd like to have more than one blog content in the same page, then I am worried about how much time I'll need in order to skip through all the posts I don't care about. The structure gives this ability, don't kill it.

As for page 1/2/3, aren't "categories" capable of doing such thing?

[Pascal Van Hecke]

Hi,

I had the same thought as Murali, so I'll just complement with the URLs:

The K2 theme for Wordpress:
http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/k2/

Matt Mullenweg's "Asides" posting that triggered it:
http://photomatt.net/2004/05/19/asides/

[rick gregory]

"For instance, why can't we have a blog template with the ability to have multiple tabbed pages?"

You mean... Textpattern (http://textpattern.com)? It has the sections concept baked in. From there, someone simply needs to customize each section and how it presents content.

[Jeremy Markum]

Expression Engine is the way to go. Like divorces, it is expensive, and worth every penny! Have a look-see at my blog and you'll see the possibilities.

[redstar]

In general Im pretty happy for the moment. I do Know that ive changed from different Blog software because they where not "it"(Im just blogging for a year)
Sinds I have WP i discover more and more af course, and now Im bussy? with finding something else.

[Gabriel Dickinson]

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