I’d like to know the rationale why blogs flow bottom up, as opposed to top down as seen in forums/IM?
I’m writing a dissertation for my MA in Information Design, it’s looking at turn-taking and conversation portrayal on the internet.
All the forums I’ve seen flow Top Down, but blogging (this includes Twitter and Facebook) both seem to flow Bottom up. Does anyone know why this convention exists?
Thanks.
By a forum flowing top down – I mean within the threads, i.e. the actual conversation
Web pages flow Top down through convention. This is the same flow as a book and traditional media content.
This is because content is sequential, that is to say no single part is intended to be viewed separately but read progressively. In other words sites that used ordered content use Top Down flows.
Forums are basically public records of conversations and as with traditional media and with the above scenarios the content is intended to be read in order. The content is placed in order and you read oldest to newest. Most forums have options to change this though. Any forum running vBulletin of phpBB for example provide preferences for this functionality and can be set to use bottom up if you want.
Blogging sites, and Micro Blogging sites as well as social networks and sites like Yahoo Answers use Bottom Up flow because the content is not ordered. Status updates on Facebook are non sequential and don’t require you to read the others before them for it to make sense the same goes for Twitter. Likewise most blogs have themes to determine the content type e.g. cars, finance, reading or film reviews etc, but the posts are non-sequential and can be read out of order.
Any site that has unordered content usually orders it through the next most logical method, i.e. by Date. Newest first stepping backwards.
There are a few exceptions and there are a few sites with mixed content, typically social networking sites like Facebook or indeed Yahoo Answers, they have unordered content but also have ordered content.
For example comments made on photos etc on Facebook go in sequential order. Yahoo Answers holds unordered content in the form of the questions submitted and ordered content i.e. the answers given. Which is why the answers to questions here are ordered Top Down.
Oh and there are also a few anomalies where there are sites that don’t understand the above concepts and seem to have randomly picked in which way the content appears prime example being comments made on YouTube which are sequential but are displayed Bottom Up with the newest being first which denies convention. This is considered poor web design and should be avoided [it's no secret that YouTube's design is flawed and loathed by many web designers]
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