Tyranny of Chronology

Why is so much web content arranged chronologically?

Of all the systems for organizing content, it’s the most arcane. A to Z, one end to the other, linear and dumb. Digital content, folks. Content that’s tagged and categorized and could be indexed and parsed a bazillion different ways. Listed Chronologically. Cuz, why?

I want my media — blog posts, photos, tweets, seesmics, comments, bookmarks — to self sort. To suggest. I want the good shit to surface and the brainfarts to sink. I don’t want to manually dig through and pick my 5 favorite or 10 favorite or whatever posts and build a static page linking to them so you can do the hard work of “catching up or totally ignoring the past” when you come to my blog as a new user. Do. Not. Want.

A. Who the f cares which ones *I* thought were good? To the extent there are readers present, and engaged, I want to know what they liked.

B. The content has a million ways to Sunday to “know” its relative quality - pageviews, manual voting, incoming links just to get started - why can’t I have a dynamic page that “permanently” displays the 10 best ever posts.

C’mon bunky, this woudn’t be hard. Maybe it’s an “internal Digg” widget anyone can install on their blog (or better still, on any of their content) so readers vote up and bury down the best and the worst. Ok, behavior could be horrid, but it’s not like lotsa smart people haven’t tried to figure this stuff out.

Srsly, Chronology? There are MUCH better ways to direct which content consistently sees the light of day and what should filter down into the archival depths. There are tons viable ratings, search and content sorting technologies out there. I want someone to mash ‘em up and build us something to play with!

It’s the Brainsieve. A “quality layer” that could span all forms of personal media. Lifestreaming + a brainsieve would retain, organize and display the nuggets of interest from a person’s outpouring of digital expression.

*As I imagine it, it’s wildly, wildly tunable. Maybe even to each reader. And that’s why Amazon keeps coming up in my mind. They’ve been hacking at this for years. Which content should float? For whom? When? What if reading someone’s blog (archives) could be like this?