RSS feedOne of the great unwritten rules of blogging, is that you don’t back date your posts.
This is so ingrained in the blogging community, that I doubt most even consider that regadless of the stated publication date, any post they read could very easily have been written today, a month ago or a year ago.
For bloggers with a limited audience, or even better no audience, this would be a great way to immediately boost their credibility. Even top bloggers could back date their entries several years, so that regular readers wouldn’t immediately see them, but the results would appear in Google etc. Instant cred.
This raises quite a number of interesting questions, including:
- Is this inherent trust in publishing dates, simply an integral part of the weblog phenomenon?
- Are people already doctoring publishing dates, but the general public doesn’t realise it?
- Once this trust is exposed or the practice becomes more common, will this really start testing the supposed benefits of “personal publishing” over traditional media?
- Are there other unwritten laws, which may also have a positive or negative effect on the blogosphere?
Blogging is still far from maturing, contrary to the many years some bloggers have put into developing the “community”. Until big business stops watching and starts selling, and people start to test the key unwritten principles of the current blogosphere, blogging will remain a geek niche, regardless of how often it is referred to in the I.T. press.
Until that time, the small players need to stop flattering themselves with minor advances in features and APIs, and start crossing the distributed content chasm.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog.)