We’re all creating a lot of content these days. We write blog posts, share our location, store links, microblog on Twitter, and more. Others can see the latest stuff, subscribe to updates in RSS, and view individual chunks of content.
In many cases, seeing old content in context is difficult. I can look at one blog post from a year ago. I can’t get from there to the posts the author wrote immediately prior or after. Most blogs are set up with an expectation that the most recent content is the most important.
New stuff matters most, but old stuff also matters.
The problem of context becomes larger with microblogging. The timeline shrinks. “Old” becomes hours, or even minutes. Understanding a single tweet sometimes requires the context of knowing what was said in the previous tweets.
For example, say you stumbled into this message:
What is Chris talking about? Wouldn’t it help if you were able to see his previous message, which mentioned he wasn’t going to wear trousers all summer?
Flickr does this well. Every photo is shown within the context of when it was uploaded:
We see an after picture. What’s it take to see the before? A single click on the thumbnail. And if we need more context, we can click browse and be taken directly into that photo’s spot in the stream.
I understand that providing context is a secondary job for lifestreaming services, which are so focused on what’s happening right now. But as long as the content is available, it will be indexed and users will become confused if they can’t figure out where they’ve landed.
How can you provide some context on some of your site’s more buried pages?
Photo credit: Bill Jackson III
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