Appalachian Infosphere -- the tail of the Long Tail

The Appalachian Infosphere blog is part of Loudoun County Public Library's 23 Things program. Library staff including me are experiencing and assessing Web 2.0 tools for their interest and potential application in public services to library users.

This post is logically an introduction -- but of course as blogs fall, it will usually be seen at the end of more recent posts, if at all. This is actually a fair example of how a small change can make us rethink long-evolved literary and information-transmission formats. After all, blogs are often described as online diaries. Has any one ever read, or published, a diary in most recent first format? Before blogs, that is. How does that affect the processing of information? And usuability?

In truth blogs fall into most recent first organization not because they are diaries, but because they following a media object model, like newspaper stories on the web, magazine articles in an infotrac search, and like people's "What's New" page from the web of 1994 or so. I'm sure this and other blogging tools have options for flipping the order -- but it's premature to use them. I think though that the case can be made the organization of information prcinples suggest that recent-first, as an order, is far more demanding than oldest-first, both for the writer(s) and the reader. Let's see how much sense this blog makes in the native ordering of the technology.