User:Marcjlangston/Hblog

Last update: 2013-04-08 1343 GMT

An hblog ("historical blog") is a blog or other periodically-published online resource that is intended to be experienced as a reflection of a time other than the present or at a chronological rate other than real time. The term "timeline blog", or simply "timeline", has increasingly replaced "hblog" in common usage and the terms are used interchangeably.

The most common use of an hblog is to create the sense of experiencing past events as they happened, although many hblogs and websites simply provide historically-timestamped articles to be aggregated into other timelines. The (often derogatorily-used) term "nostalgic Web" was coined in reference to the virtual world-of-the-past created by the aggregate of hblogs.

Hblog presentation
Timeline readers present material much as a traditional blog/feed readers, with the specific distinction that articles are most often presented oldest-item-first. Most common feed readers (e.g., Google Reader, most modern web browsers) are enabled to present timelines, usually separating hblog entries from the user's "current blog" entries. Users can subscribe to an entire timeline feed or set up content tags to aggregate only specific topics within an hblog or set of hblogs.

Settings
Whereas a more traditional blog aggregator or reader accumulates online material as it is published - in real, "current" time - hblog readers (or "timeline readers") accumulate and present material based on a combination of three primary settings :


 * A "timeframe" specified by the user to establish the historic time period in which the reader should be aggregating material. This can be either a range of dates (e.g., "from January 1, 2000 though December 31, 2000") or a single starting date (e.g., "starting on January 1, 2000") which implies an ending date of the current date as of the time the user sets the timeframe.


 * A "timerate" determining how quickly the reader time should pass. Different timeline readers offer different timerate options, although the most common are:
 * "Normal time" will cause the reader time to pass one minute/hour/day for every minute/hour/day that passes in real, current time. A normal timerate provides the user with the closest equivalent to an "as it happened" experience by presenting material in the same order and at the same pace as it would have become available in real life.
 * "Fast time" can be customized so that reader time passes more quickly than real time (for example, one day of reader time passes for every hour of real time), providing some of the "as it happened" effect but condensing the experience over less time.
 * "Full time" will cause the reader to accumulate all material in the timeframe range or from the starting date to the present (if no end date is provided). Full time effectively causes the reader to compile a history and make all its entries available at once; the "full timeline" is made available beginning to end.  Most timeline readers set a maximum amount that will be compiled at a time to avoid overburdening the reader's resources; the user indicates when they are ready to replace the last-compiled information with new information.


 * The HRSS (historical RSS) timestamp established by the author of the blog posting. The timestamp is roughly equivalent to a news article's "dateline". It is essentially the original publish date of an article and establishes the "historic post time" of the material that is then used by the timeline reader to determine when/if to aggregate it and/or how to arrange the material with respect to other timeline material.

Types of timelines
Timelines are classified based on who is controlling the specific content sources, tags/topics, the timeframe, and the timerate.

Personal
The content of a personal timeline is determined by the user. The content of a personal timeline is analogous to the aggregate content of any individual's (non-h)blog/feed reader. The user determines the timeframe and timerate for the entire timeline and subscribes to (typically) multiple timeline providers for content. The user may also define content tags to filter for specific topical content.

A common use of a personal timeline is for historical research in education. The timeline can be used to establish context around a noted event or time period, providing period-specific news from a wide range of sources that are not necessarily directly related to the event or event participants. Research timelines have been widely adopted by primary and secondary educators as a method to establish a breadth of context and connections that is difficult to achieve with and a textbook. A popular (non-academic) use of a personal timeline is to focus on the events leading up to an anniversary event (a school reunion, for example) as a means to evoke the time period.

Topic-specific timelines are another popular use of the personal timeline, with a focus on a particular topic of interest over a given time period (for example, media mentions of Barack Obama during the period surrounding his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech).

Curated
Curated timelines are managed by a person or organization for the purpose of aggregating specific topics or content sources and presenting those to the user as a single timeline content source. Curated timelines are popular because the user need merely subscribe to the timeline without setting a timeframe or timerate.

Although their use by news organizations has been criticized as prone to censorship or bias due to the ability to omit specific points of view without the end user's awareness, the use of curated timelines by entertainment media has been one of the major drivers of the overall exposure of hblogs through through their use in the promotion and extension of TV, movies, books, periodicals, and music.

Combined
A combined timeline is effectively the personalization of curated timeline. Users treat a curated timeline as merely one of many subscribed timelines, adding timelines from other sources while maintaining a shared timeframe/timerate. Combined timelines allow end users to add additional content to that which is provided by the curated timeline depending on their personal interests. Advertisers will often create timelines to complement a popular curated timeline and entice users to combine them to create "a fuller experience" that essentially integrates the product(s) into the narrative of the aggregate timeline.

Adoption and notable examples
Hblog usage, particularly the creation of personal timelines, began with the introduction of the HRSS standard and integration into several popular RSS reader add-ons for the Firefox browser. HRSS was soon integrated in to most "traditional" standalone blog readers.

Early timelines were simply extensions of traditional blogs. It was the use of timelines by established media and news outlets that drove mass awareness and adoption by the broader public and established the potential of the timeline as both a rich extension of traditional media and as a standalone info-tainment medium.

Mad Men timeline
Seen as a way to supplant traditional blogs he saw as merely "about the show" with "an experience that would become an integral part of the show", Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner established a curated timeline coinciding with the 2011 season of the series. Aggregating timeline material from the New York Times, The Times of London, Advertising Age, and the major broadcast television networks, the timeline provided a view of the real-world events that would have occurred between each week's "episode time". The context created through the timeline not only enforced the feeling of the period but show writers felt they were better able to reference events of the period (and their affect of the characters) with less exposition in the show itself. The Mad Men timeline was also expanded to include content stretching back to the beginning of the series to provide the same experience to viewers of DVD, on-demand, and time-shifted versions of the series.

The Mad Men timeline also included content from advertisers, both fictitious and real. The inclusion of period-correct ads within the timeline generated user attention and revenue that was reported to be significantly higher than sponsors' other online advertising and drove most of the early industry interest in the use of curated timelines. The use of content-compatible timeline ads has since become a typical feature of most entertainment-related timelines.

NBC News 9/11 project
As part of their coverage surrounding the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, timelines and related material from NBC News, MSNBC and their associated news and entertainment properties were aggregated into a single 9/11 feed. Content from local NBC affiliates and a ticker showing Yahoo! search results were also included.

A unique (for that time) aspect of the 9/11 timeline was the dedication of a special website to provide a real-time video counterpart to the collected non-video material. In addition to the traditional subscription to the timeline via a timeline reader, select timeline content was provided in Bloomberg-TV-style windows and news tickers alongside actual historic programming from the entire week prior to and after the attacks. MSNBC, CNBC, and The Today Show all dedicated portions of their 9/11/2011 programing to concurrent airing of the timeline video in an "as it happened" format. Anniversary timelines have since become a common component to major-outlet news coverage.

Outside of new programming, non-news broadcasters such as ESPN Classic and The History Channel now regularly integrate timelines into their programming, using timelines to support a program chronology spanning entire weeks or even months.

The Beatles on iTunes
In February 2012, Steve Jobs announced that The Beatles music catalog would finally be made available on Apple's iTunes store. As part of the agreement with the band's representatives and Yoko Ono (who just the year before had complained that most ideas previously put forth [by Apple] to bring the music of The Beatles to iTunes were "simply gauche" ), the availability of the band's music would coincide with the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles' first single and would be made available in the same order and roughly seven-year timeframe of the release of the original UK singles and albums. Running concurrently with the staged release of the music would be an ongoing Beatles timeline inaugurating the new "Timeline" section of the iTunes store, the overall experience dubbed "Beatlemania 2.0" by Jobs. The timeline would be curated by noted Beatles historian Martin Lewis with contributions by Ono, surviving Beatles members Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, and long-time Beatles producer Sir George Martin. The Beatles Timeline would combine content from the UK music magazine New Music Express (NME) and the BBC, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, selected music periodicals from around the world, and material from other noted news and cultural outlets.

The timeline became available just a week after the Jobs' announcement on February 15, 2012 - notably, 33 and 1/3 weeks prior to the 8 AM, October 5, 2012 availability of the first single, Love Me Do. The timeline's content over the eight-month lead time fed media coverage and generated renewed world-wide consumer interest in the band. Apple representatives described the success of Beatles-related sales as "easily beyond our high-end estimates".

On Popular Cultural
Although the "Beatlemania 2.0" notion of "a public mesmerized anew by Ed Sullivan and Shea Stadium, millions staring into the glow of their iPad screens" was derided by some critics, other observers have suggested that timelines could create the sort of shared cultural experiences (albeit virtual) that had waned since the heyday of the "Big Three" television networks.

"Nostalgic web" critics point to the relatively few number of timelines focused on the near-present as evidence that - academic benefits notwithstanding - the hblog presents only "the Internet our grandparents' knew" with little productive benefit to users.

On Historical Studies
Google had made content search an everyday occurrence, and HRSS helped to grow the time-centric search. Serious historic searches began to move out of the university library and in to easy reach of anyone with a browser. The hblog provided the platform to present searches in a time-focused narrative while maintaining the content focus of the traditional search engine and content tags.

The ease of timeline-aided research has driven renewed interest in historical studies, swelling the ranks of the amateur historian community. Starting with the Harvard and MIT university libraries, academic collections have become increasingly timeline-enabled in response to the a growing interest in history studies and the ease with which timelines allowed the general public to tap these resources.

Stemming from the tendency for content to become available in reverse order - the more recent, easier-to-catalog material being enabled before older material - a common (although not seriously-regarded) ranking of academic collections used among amateur historians has become the "timeline start", reflecting the common amateur view that "older [content] is better". Certain timeline readers now allow users to set a timeframe end date without a beginning date if content filters/tags are also used. The resulting timeline displays timestamped material as it becomes available, generally in reverse chronological order. The availability of new (that is, older) content is often met with a flurry of research activity among "reverse timeline" devotees.

On the Periodical Industry
Prior to those widespread use of hblogs, old magazines were typically of interest only to memorabilia collectors, libraries, and research students. But growing interest and the potential for more eyeballs raised the possibility of new dollars for old content. The long histories of many popular periodicals and the long-form (compared to current-day "snippet-driven blog news" ) nature of much of their content proved to be a good match for the amateur historian crowd. Periodicals that were often consider past their prime now saw the possibility to ride the wave of nostalgic interest in to a new source of income. Magazines now touted themselves as resources for both casual browsers and serious researchers. The new readers proved irresistible to advertisers. Some hblogs were popular enough that once-defunct magazines like TV Guide and Newsweek have been resurrected in regularly-produced, present-day electronic versions for the web and e-readers.

Life Magazine's embrace of the new technology became a case study in the use of the new technology to bring new life to a relatively past-its-prime institution. Using it's widely-regarded photography collection as a visual hook, Life's hblog expanded it's website's own Timeline feature to encompass the entirety of the content from the history of the magazine. It's "Stay a while" feature suggested that, rather than simply focusing on one specific timeline-presented story of interest, a reader would gain even more insight by examining the topic within the context of an entire issue. In addition to greater ad revenue driven by redirection to the magazine's website, the whole-issue focus created opportunities for related paid-partner content and even drove interested in collecting back issues of the original paper magazine.

Newspapers experienced much the same impact as magazines, with local, national, and international dailies given a new lease on life. Preservation efforts like the Library of Congress' National Digital Newspaper Program blossomed in to full-fledged political causes with calls for "modern access to our historic past" leading to increases in funding for the digitizing and timeline-enabling of newspapers.