Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?
On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.
The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.
We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.
Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.
What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.
