Elrond, the elf master of the Last Homely House, in The Hobbit, reads a mysterious treasure map made by dwarves, at first using the light of the room and then moonlight, letting the beams shine through from the back of the map. Along with the runish letters visible to anyone there are moon-letters, which can only be read by the light of the same shape moon and in the same season as when the letters were first written. (On 53 in the Del Rey paperback.)

The best scripters could easily create a blog whose posts were only available in the same stage of moon as when they were written. That would make a curious web site, something like waiting for some rare flower to bloom, as it does, once a decade for one hour in the dead of night.

In a sense the deep archive of an old site like Scripting News is a collection of moon-letters -- the old messages vanish (in part because of their large number and in part because their context is lost) and all we see are the posts visible to the naked eye, today's or this week's. True, there is a search engine, but there are thousands of messages you will never find because you don't know how to call them up, unless you are the sort of scholar who gives up his life to run his fingers over the traces of someone else's life.

Blogs, then, as dwarvish cryptography, with no masterful Elrond waiting at the Last Homely House to read the words, to replenish the saddlebags with food, to fill us with hope and good wishes, before we set out on a dark quest. That's why I think some bloggers should mine their archives and write a book. [Source]