The idea of creating arbitrary (or idea-based) structures online really interests me in this posting by Dave Winer. The chronology of a blog or linkblog stream is a real virtue, but it doesn't organize content by ideas the way a nonfiction book chapter often does. If the outlining community could figure out how to keep the advantages of chronology for recording work in progress and engaging with others on the blog while at the same time finding a tech and workflow solution to reorganizing that content into larger things with idea-structures, like chapters, that would be a real breakthrough. This is very interesting to muse over for a solo writer's own projects as well as for collaborations that might take place between groups of writers and even groups of sites. Also useful to think about here is the input/output or creation/publishing distinction in a blog post by Chris Wolverton.

I sometimes imagine a single-blog search engine based on the model of a concordance, the special kind of index found in the back of some Bibles, which gives you every use of a key term such as "Moses" or "Mark Twain" set up in a list form like this:

• the character's first appearance in Mark Twain's novel, Tom Sawyer, published in

• choosing his distinctive pen name, Mark Twain, from a colorful phrases used on steamboats

• when the crew member called out, "Mark twain," the pilot knew the water's depth beneath

• he came down from the mountain, Moses saw that he was going to have some explaining to do

• that the water had now parted, then Moses turned and said, "Let's do this thing!" and the journey

• and so for a good number of years Moses had serious credibility as right-hand man and advisor to

With that kind of context, you know instantly which one of those you want to click on. A concordance structure could speed the use of older blog content by readers and even the reuse by the original writer who might want to reorganize the content into focused, well-developed chapters. That's my theory, anyway.