If it Ain’t Got a Date, Read it at Your Fate

Surfing/Writing Tip from the_guv@guvnr.com.

You’re surfing, maybe researching. You need info. And you happen upon some-site.com with, pretty much, the words you need to read. Looks good.

But. Something sparks your headset and, casting your eye away from the headline or top line or so, you recall it’s a good idea to check the date.

…Hold on. You do do that, don’t you? I mean, you do look at…the date?

You DON’T? Hey, freako! Sorry, caught my reflection. You mean, you don’t look for a date? Let’s discuss this.

You do? Read something else. (Leave a comment first.)

Da-da-da-doo Date er tastic

Right, so we’ve established, precisely, nothing! And seeing as I’m having a waffle, do yourself a favour and skip this spiel till the last paragraph where, you never know, maybe I’ll have something useful to say. In the meantime, I’m just gonna feign incredulity that anyone could possibly, remotely, read anything remotely approaching an entire article or blog post, without establishing its date.

1066 and {insert timely cliche here}

Dates are important, or useful anyway. We can all spew out, well, probably a few. They not only reference occurrences in a given point in time, for good and bad, but they also add relevance. Or is that the same thing? Anyway, in this post - which ironically is timeless - we’re interested mainly in relevance.

An analogy. You’re on a train and someone opposite just got off, throwing down a paper. You pick it up and, probably, news items give you an idea as to the timeliness of the rag. If not, you’d glance at the date. Tell me you would!

OK. More pertinent, bear with me… You google a stock price, or whether your bank is still in biz. When you scan the search results, and those resulting web pages you click through, you look at the date. Aha! Now, for sure, you look at the date. Why? Because you want the latest information, hot to trot.

And that’s my point. Relevance.

Sometimes I find myself reading some post or other, online, and for the love of Mike, I can’t find a date. The info looks good, and maybe even rings true, but I can’t find the date. There’s no damn date. They left out the date! You know what? Bin it. It’s unreliable, they don’t deserve the traffic.

…This is a generalisation. I mean, if you’re after a recipe for Chicken Tikka Marsala, probably the date falls down the agenda. I can understand that. But if you want information about something remotely technical, like how to compress a video file, shed a virus, size up a new gizmo, or whether by you pressing the ^ key anything useful could ever happen, then you probably want to know the relevance; the relevance, to our cumulative frame of reference. (And that even sounds intelligent.) Ergo, you need a date.

By the way, if you are one of those people that write time-dependant articles that I’m wondering, “Where-the-bloody-hell-is-the-date?”, then I’m sorry, but you’re annoying. Feel free to answer that, by the way.

What do you think? What would Julian or Gregory say? Your comments are automatically dated, carbon-dated, time-capsuled, then binned.