Over the years Dave Winer has described software tools that by their very nature are meant to display the same content in two forms, each form in service of a different purpose or a different part of a process. That's meant to be a central virtue of the software. Describing one software tool, he said, for example:
You have two modes of viewing the content, the editorial view and the finished product view — but it's important that the are just views on the same data, so when a change is made to one, it automatically appears in the other. This was the key concept in Manila's Edit This Page function. (Source: item 5 in this blog post.)
Dave also recently posted a link to various postings about LBBS, a tool with two modes of viewing content. In an outline-based group message tree that might contain hundreds of messages, new postings become hard to find, he points out. But the software tool under discussion uses the time stamp for each message, I believe, to call up a second kind of interactive display. In one posting he describes a simple flipping of a switch, so to speak, to move back and forth between the two display formats the tool offers.
I find that all very interesting, for sure. For one thing, I've long enjoyed writing informally in blog posts while thinking of those posts as a warm-up for another sort of useful writing, such as a magazine article or book chapter.
I believe it's correct to say that most or all blogging software organizes the composing screen or dashboard by the time stamp on each new posting, and if you want to include today's writing in your draft article you have to cut and paste it by hand into another outline or document. But Dave Winer's recent mention of software with two modes of viewing makes me wonder whether blogging software might be organized around the document, not the timeline. Today, say, I'll write a new node on my chapter draft, and as I write the new node it appears on the screen in front of me in place in the progression of the chapter. But I'm imagining a button on the side whose function is to ask this question: "Would you like this node to be posted to the blog too?"
The time stamp on the new node places the new writing at the top of the blog's home page. That's one display. The other display is the chapter, in process on the screen as I write.
Just musing here about time stamp magic of a different kind than what I'm used to.