Rising to the top

Recently, I posted a one line, grammatically incorrect (actually it just had a typo - a missing 'of') blog in which all I did was praise Seth Godin's article and point to it. I didn't think anything I had to say about the topic could really add any additional value so I refrained from putting in any of my comments. I didn't think much about it then but afterwards I found out, interestingly, this article had reached the top of the Popular Entries for the last 24 hours at JavaBlogs.com. This is not really such a big deal but I have an RSS feed to the popular entries and it is always interesting to see what rises to the top in that list. Because Mozilla's Live Bookmarks shows only the title, I have to judge whether I want to read the article based on the title.

Despite it being a collection of Java blogs, it is infrequent that anything seriously technical about Java manages to hold popular attention. It is always the more interestingly worded title that starts to move up rapidly (perhaps the only exceptions are the latest buzzwords and the word 'performance'). More technical titles generally languish somewhere in the middle of the list which at the top is crowded by articles that are inflammatory in their title or simply very vague about their content. The advantage of the latter (which mine must've inadvertently become) is that you have to click on the link to find out what's in the blog. This makes the blog more 'popular'. This, of course, makes it go up higher in the list allowing reaching more people and setting off a chain reaction.

So, here's (deliberately this time) a rather vague title for this blog to test this theory :-)

Who cares about the chronological ordering of blogs?

There is a new way of designing blogs at Blogger and in general it is very easy - point and click, move around, group - the usual goodies associated with good Web-UI these days. The new blogger re-design also has a different mechanism of listing previous posts. They now group it by chronological order. I have spent some time trying to understand why this is useful to people who come to my site? And I have been completely defeated in understanding its purpose. Before I go into a litany of my issues with this new way of organizing posts I want to show what I mean -

This is the old way it used to be -

And this is the new format (which you can see in the right pane of this page if you are at the original blog site and not seeing this through a reader) -

I don't see why this useful for anyone other the blog author - and even for the author it is only informative (ah February 2007 was a good month for me - Oh Gosh! I didn't post a single thing between October 2005 and August 2006).

Here's what is lost by going to this format -
a. Earlier visitors (especially first-time visitors which are the majority of the visitors according to Statcounter's indication of the abysmal popularity of this blog :-)) cannot see a quick list of other posts which might catch their attention. They now have to do a deliberate task of expanding those date nodes to see what I might have written previously. I might just stop putting in titles altogether.
b. And really what is the reason to group it by month or date - do any of my readers really relate to the dates that I published my articles? How is August 2006 any more important than Jan 2007?

I am sure that there is way somewhere to hack out of it and maybe I'll have to sit down and hunt for it. I searched for it in the options and could not find a way to switch this off.