(Up to: Interfaces )

Over on Podcast 12 at Aural Contraception, Ron Chrisley proposes that blogs should be structured such that the vertical axis of a page moves forward through time, rather than backwards, as you progress down the page. Personally, I think this is an awful idea. Is this just because I'm used to the current way of article organisation? Or because there are very practical UI reasons for setting it out as is done? Let's see...

• Before blogs, there were plenty of "news scroll" sites, such as (off the top of my head) Slashdot and K5. What about non-geek sites?
• Other than on the web, this issue has generally been user-configurable - for example, in any decent mail/news reader software (and now with RSS readers), the ability to have new messages listed in either order is generally present. Interstingly for this, I seem to keep my mail in the order that Ron prescribes, with new mail at the bottom. One helpful thing that Thunderbird does here, though, is jump to newly-received messages when I check my mail. Without this, I'd seriously consider reversing the flow.
• Thus, perhaps we can say that blogs are broken - or at least restricted by the "fluid" (rather than deliberately-fragmented) nature of webpages.
• Perhaps one fix would be to use cookies to work out new articles/postings since the user last looked, and jump down the page to the next unread article. How difficult would this be to do? Alternatively, simply hide articles that have been read, by default.
• This leads to other problems, which we need Universal Cookies for, perhaps.