I want to write about the value of archives.
I wrote one weblog for ten years. I would not have kept it but for the value of the archive. I returned to find links; I returned to look up the date of something important; I returned out of pride to show someone something that I had written; I returned to re-learn what I once knew, fitfully, intermittently. And having enjoyed the archives so, I could never help adding one more post for possible future enjoyment.
This focus has certainly made me interested in the archives of others. I visit and revisit old posts of my favourite bloggers. Sometimes I even dig in the Wayback Machine for blog posts that are no longer with us.
Time and again I have heard the story of discovering a new web comic: the discoverer is enthralled, navigates to the first comic, and spends the rest of the night reading until they reach the latest one — only to realise that the comic has been long abandoned. I have never heard that story with a weblog as its object. For weblogs it seems the story goes like this: the discoverer is enthralled, navigates to the latest entry, realises the blog has been long abandoned, and stops reading.
If only our tools could help us. Imagine if I could point Google Reader at a derelict blog and tell it to start feeding me posts as if I was reading five years ago. The technology is there, it just requires the interest.
I am also interested to find out how similar different archiving systems work in terms of metadata. I’d imagine blogs are generally the same, but what about the question, like you say, of integrating all these different archives under one big “Reader.”
RSS is a nice way of packaging most kinds of data to let it wander freely into other people’s systems, yet in many cases not even bloglike applications support it effectively — I’ve just signed up for Twitter in the last week, and I’m still trying to get my timeline into Google Reader.