If you blog just one thing today, what would it be? This has nothing to do with being shipwrecked on an island where you get to pick a handful of posts to take with you on that island. No it’s simpler and harder.
Every day your blog can be another entry into your online associative array.
thepost = myhash[’bold lentil delillo’]
And if past statistical analysis is any indicator of future click-through behaviors then most of you won’t click on the above link. An associative array is retrieving “a datum using its key”. In this case the key is “bold lentil delillo” and voila – I can find my post on DeLillo’s Underworld. Yes I read it. Five years ago. Yes I really like those quotes. Could I find those exact quotes (and three words) before without digging through bookshelves and boxes? No I could not.
Once it’s a blog post though it’s everywhere and nowhere.
It took me a while to get through Underworld. It was a hard read post Sept-11 and yet the prose still resonates years later. The quotes, notes and words though are not a tag. They are not a one word summary or attribute of an object or element. They are a condensation of certain elements of a reading experience. Shared with anyone but probably not that many people.
But if one use of a blog is to sequentially post things so that they can be found effortlessly at some future date, then don’t get so stuck on having nothing unique to say – what do you want to remember? How to do a specific type of screen shot? How to spell mnemonic? Anything. The blog name plus the post content plus a search engine equals a different approach to blogging. It’s not about readers. They can come as they want but it’s about simply being able to find stuff. You can organize it and auction off later (if you want to)…
Bold Lentil 