The proper place for micro content

Jason Kottke’s lat­est redesign is already get­ting quite a lot of com­ments here and there, all of it good stuff — just as the thoughts Jason has him­self behind the whole thing. I’ve thought a bit about content/blog orga­niz­ing before, the point being about the same; why should other bits of con­tent (moblog­ging posts etc.) live some­where else just because of plat­form technology.

At that time I sim­ply put the lat­est moblog images on the top right, added a side­blog just below and kept on going as pre­vi­ously. And while I still con­sider inte­grat­ing my moblog posts in the stan­dard weblog, I actu­ally like the idea of hav­ing my low-threshold stuff kept out of what hope­fully some day will become thought­ful reflec­tions, heavy knowledge-based obser­va­tions etc. (for the time being they’re not really, sorry about that). I do, how­ever, agree that a bet­ter use of cat­e­gories should be able to do the trick, keep­ing the idea of “one blog” alive. So I guess it all comes down to how you define your blog — and the con­tent in it. For now I think it makes good sense seper­at­ing my con­tent as most peo­ple propably like the idea of being able to pick and choose from the three types of con­tent I’ve got going here.

Which leads to my actual point: I’ll put some work into gen­er­at­ing cus­tom XML feeds instead. First of all, it gives total end user con­trol over what and how the con­tent trav­els from here to there with­out doing real cus­tomiz­ing fea­tures (doesn’t really pay off, remem­ber) and I’m pretty sure the reg­u­lar read­ers of my lit­tle weblog are aggre­ga­tor peo­ple, all of them (if not, please leave a “think again, stu­pid geezer”-post in the com­ments). Sec­ondly, if just the weblog is designed right, in most cases I believe the divide of dif­fer­ent types of con­tent gives a bet­ter overview of what is going on. But again, this is true when the dif­fer­ent sec­tions equals dif­fer­ent con­tent. In Kottke’s case I can see it doesn’t which makes his redesign quite cool! No mat­ter what: Respect for exper­i­ment­ing with the for­mat. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what the nice Mov­able­Type / Type­pad (they’ve com­mented Kottke’s post) are up to next. And what every­one else will do.