Blog Archives and Living Ideas

I was having a conversation with Bob Baxley a few months ago about how the structure of Flickr makes it possible for people to continue to discover and view "old" photographs -- photographs that had been uploaded months or years before. These usually surface through tag surfing, or searches, or groups, or personal tag maps, or the feature on the explore page that shows the most interesting photos from a year before.

Usually, in a blog format, old photos, or old blog posts don't get a lot of a traffic. Most traffic is reserved for the most recent post, and regular readers of the blog are assumed to have already read what is in the archive. Blogs don't really accommodate *new* users -- who are arriving for the first time. The tag maps that people have been adding to their sites (see the one at the top of We make money not art) help with this problem, while simultaneously providing a snapshot of the interests of the blog authors.

If you know of any interesting blog designs that address this kind of issue, please post it in the comments.