Responding to Phil Wolff, Sebastian Fiedler explains very well, I think, the problematic gap between weblogs organized mainly by time and other sites organized by such things as "visual mapping tools." He says:
There is nothing wrong with the Weblog format per se. What we are lacking are interfaces that would allow for a smooth and quick transformation of content into other, more appropriate, representational formats... well, and back again...
Republishing a clickable visual map within your Webpublishing environment is an enormous pain. Thus the two representational formats of visual maps and mostly text-based, chronologically organized Weblog contents hardly ever get combined in one single workflow.
The workflow gap exists for both writer and reader, but for the writer I suspect it is largely a change into the role of editor (perhaps the role of designer, too). Perhaps some genius will find a way to program the editor's work so it can be handed over to a computer, but until then the very human task remains: to organize a complex body of information so others can use it.
Weblogs may be worthwhile without their content being saved and shaped into more fixed forms -- thinking and writing each day benefits the blogger and may build a useful exchange for a community of readers. I think of the clarifying work done by certain political bloggers, for example, writers who help advance the civic conversation about the events of the day. Bloggers certainly helped people think about the impending war last winter.
If, however, the dailies could usefully accumulate into something more fixed, and if the ideas would benefit from a conceptual rather than chronological order, then someone has to create that conceptual order and shape that fixed display. It is easy to imagine, though, a program linking the chronology of the weblog to the conceptual shape of a more fixed web site, perhaps a wiki. The program might save steps for the editor. If you could, for example, drag an icon representing today's weblog post into a concept map of the site, and if you could highlight three or four key words in the new post for the program to use as links to other posts in the map, then you would have something rather amazing. A reader could click on the section of the map representing the new post, and the keywords would appear nearby, with lines heading out to other recent posts using those words.
I'll come back from my imaginary software now. Without the dream software, the tasks are largely editorial, which means they require substantial thought and care. It is, I suspect, a bit like writing a novel: one doesn't just write every day and produce a manuscript in a year or two. There is much planning and shaping and revising along the way. Bloggers need to ask themselves, then, whether writing the dailies is enough, or whether they also want to turn the weblog into that other kind of intellectual project. Some projects clearly deserve it.
The exchange with Sebastian Fiedler continues here.