The old ones are the best

I usually write this blog about once a week. But on those occasions when I feel that my last week’s blog was particularly interesting or well-observed ;) I experience some reluctance in “overlaying it” with today’s more recent offering…. It feels as though the articles “underneath” will now never get looked at – especially the ones right at the bottom of the pile.

But on his Long Tail blog this week, Chris Anderson was reflecting on the power of search engines in discovering archived content. As Anderson points out, our thinking about information has been dominated by the newspaper model – new information is the only thing which matters and the only thing we pay attention to. We don’t bother to read what it said in yesterday’s newspaper – however good the articles were. In contrast, Anderson points out that search engines like Google are ‘time agnostic’ – what matters to them is relevance as measured by the number of links a page of content has acquired. Quite rightly, this reflects the level of other people’s interest in that content and the significance they attached to it. And, obviously, the longer any information has been hanging around (if it was interesting or useful at all), the more such links it will have gained.

So, the blog I wrote some months ago (which I (at least) still consider to be the most interesting!) could well be the one which people (who have never encountered my blog) are the most likely to find via Google and read. And that could be true even in a year’s time. I like that.

Mind you, maybe, this model wouldn’t work for someone whose theories about the world and human nature evolve more quickly than mine do.