More On How Blogs Are Organized

I emailed a few of the folks I mentioned below, as being great "short and sweet" bloggers and they've replied with some very interesting ideas.

Cory Doctorow points to this piece he did about how he uses a blog -- My Blog, My Outboard Brain.

Dave Winer expands on the notion, pointing to a great post by Lisa Williams on how RSS slices and dices information for our intellectual dining pleasure.

Oddly, what this all makes me think of is a remark by my old boss Harry Tse on Chinese food (it's dinner time and I am pretty hungry. Maybe that's why the food metaphors!). He noted that most Chinese food is plated in such a way that knives aren't neccessary for the diner. Western food, he said, involved a different division of labor between the cook and the eater -- western cooks might put a steak on the plate, but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.

In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more control over how to display their information to themselves, slicing and dicing incoming information from different sites, displaying it in ways far beyond simple reverse-chron, and putting the visual "sauce" on it that they like best.