Blogs and blogging software are becoming ubiquitous. They let you journal your every thought, and combined with web feeds make it easy for anyone to read your thoughts in the way that they prefer. But the basic blog is still lacking in functionality in my opinion. Guided by Internet search engines, people often return to blog postings long after they were posted and possibly after they are relevant. Stale posts can be irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

Constructive bloggers often re-visit and update their posts from the past as they learn more about the topic. Take the PressThink blog for instance. Jay Rosen is quick to add to his posts with a summary of other people's comments, as he comes across them, in a follow-up area he calls the "After Matter". He include quotes from other sites and links to additional information, along with his own commentary on how his opinion changes as time passes. If all blog software had a feature that supported this, posts would rarely go stale. I can see this turning into a Wiki-like page for each blog post.

There's also the Work.com site. While I'm not sure it can be called a blog, each article has several sections recommending other sites, services and blogs that provide additional information on the topic.

Maybe it seems like a lot of work to revisit your posts days, weeks or years later? I guess you could say that. But if you are providing information to a community of readers, you might feel that you owe them to keep the information up to date. You could look at it this way, the more quality content that appears on your site, the more loyal readers you will find and keep. If they come to know you as an expert, they'll be more likely to return to your site and recommend it to others.

You might say that existing comment systems provide the type dynamic updates that I'm talking about, but on popular blogs I see a really poor signal to noise ratio in the comments. It's not really a conversation as much as it is a shouting match there. Having something like the after thought section allows the author to pull together reactions to the original post in a clear and concise manner.

What do you think?