"I've been writing about it on my blog for many years."
That's a sentence a variety of interesting people might utter or post. It's a reminder that good new thinking and writing slides effortlessly down the screen and out of sight, into the archive, where it might be preserved and maybe located again someday. Maybe.
But it's also a reminder of a structural problem in blog-format web writing that people have understood for many years. Despite other real and substantial virtues, the format by itself leaves posts about a topic more or less isolated from each other down there in the archive.
Writing isolated from other writing on the same topic — that's not the best we can do. Writing that links and builds explicitly on other writing is far better.
Well, related posts can be tagged and categorized at the time of composition, but that takes focused habit-building as well as good insight about what tags make sense now and might be useful later. Related posts can also perhaps be located and pulled together later through time-consuming searching of an archive, which is an unpleasant approach. Using most tools available to us today, both tagging and searching are demoralizing. For most online tools, useful old-fashioned tools like an index or a concordance aren't available.
So many of us miss out on an opportunity. By organizing several posts hidden in the archive we could piece together two valuable resources: 1) the history of something, which can help us know why we are currently blessed by and stuck with the version of it we have today, and 2) and the components of something, which can help us see how it functions on its good and bad days.
In those two ways, organizing several posts from the archive can make fresh analytical thinking and invention possible. But it's not easy to find and organize several posts from the archive.