[tjr]

How do you think the chronological, little-bit-at-a-time blog format compares to longer articles, or books?

I've found individual blog posts, linked to from sites like HN or found in web searches, to be greatly helpful, but often when I go to a blog like one of those that you shared here, and try to start reading it from the top, it feels disorganized; the content isn't presented in any ordering that necessarily makes good pedagogical sense.

[wpietri]

When blogs first started getting popular, I thought, "Man, chronological organization is the dumbest possible structure. Somebody will soon come up with something better." And so I never started a blog. Now I just feel dumb for waiting.

The best solutions I've seen for this are a) organized post series (e.g., [1]) and posts that aggregate a bunch of things previously written (e.g. [2]). I'd like to see people take that further, so if people have other examples of interesting approaches, I'd love it if they could reply with them.

I will say that editorial work is hard. As I've experimented with writing a book, it's clear to me that whatever I think the plan is up front, it's going to change, and that refactoring the structure as I go is expensive. It's cheaper to do it in large batches. So I think most blogs will just always suck in this regard. I suspect the future is in collaboration, where the author and blog readers can collectively build and maintain the table of contents and intro material. That would mirror the writer/editor collaboration that goes into books.

[1] http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-u... [2] This is only an ok-ish example, but it's the only one I could think of: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2014/02/04/how-to-get-p...