I’m starting to see what I put in my other diatribe about design starting to happen on other sites on the internet. No, not about the goofy font gibberish, or the currently–in–vogue grid—thing, but when I put in the notes at the end. Whatever happened to UPDATE?

A few years ago, somebody came up with the bright idea of posting drivel on these things we call “blogs”. A few years after that, people started editing these blogs. And with the ruthless (and sometimes nonsensical) editing comes the realization that some people will get upset with you if the changes you make are not explicit.

Then began the joy of footnotes and updates. I’ve used both with varying degrees of satisfaction, but I never really liked how an update looked like…well…an update. Not that I’m striving for some timeless posts, but there’s a date on them for a reason.

Footnotes are problematic because they don’t look like edits. Plus, if I make a statement that isn’t clear inside the text, why would I put it at the end? Granted, I loved reading that extra stuff at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, but that extra material wasn’t linked with the main text. Your experience in the book was enhanced, but those were in separate appendices, not at the bottom of the page.

These two strategies seem to fail my logical test. While I understand the virtues of both, if this were a paper periodical, how would I update a story? Offer a corrected version of the post? Add another story explaining the logical fallacies in the previous story?

Maybe some endnotes, maybe?

The other day, when I noticed that my post needed clarification, I simply added some notes at the end. The notes are there, not as updates, not as footnotes, but as simple clarifications. Since a blog post is all at once immediate, there’s no need to go back in time to amend the story. With the addition of notes, whatever is unclear can be made clear.

I guess I’m more of an endnote kind of person. Since further detail comes in many forms, if it really deserves to make it in the post, shouldn’t it be in the post? The implication being that it’s not in some aside–style soliloquy, but in an appendix–like addition to the content.

That way you maintain the topic at hand, without getting into trivialities (isn’t that what comment sections are for?). Endnotes imply an update of the content without an explicit statement to that effect. It also encourages new ideas to go and live in their own posts, rather than occupy space at the end of something from a while ago.

The impetus for this story is a clarification of a simple concept I’m using that I’ve seen from other people. It’s most likely that through the wisdom of crowds we come to the same conclusion, that content needs endnotes, not updates.

status: published
lastmod: '2008-12-18T12:09:21.000Z'
excerpt: 'It’s most likely that through the wisdom of crowds we come to the same conclusion, that content needs endnotes, not updates.'
author: meadowhill login
cms: textpattern
custom:
  section: articles
  custom_1: endnotes updates blogs writing