Tag: time

What is a week?

Today morning I had a brief conversation with a coworker. As many office works do on Wednesday, and not only on Wednesday, we were dreaming of the upcoming weekend. Partially, as a joke, we said that it would be nice to have an extra day in a week that nobody else would know about. We could then rest and relax in the middle of the week without anyone noticing our absence.

That reminded me of the system that I’ve built a few years ago. It had to do with schedule generation for a bunch of people who were working shifts. The rules of who can take which shifts were constantly changing. And so, in order to build the most flexible system that I could think of, I implemented one which had a variable number of days per week. You could easily build a week of just three days or eight or ten. On top of that, days could be easily rearranged in order. That was a fun setup, but eventually it proved very useful. I left the company many years ago, but I hear they still use the system with just a few extra tweaks.

Once I remembered that system, it got me thinking more about the definition of the week. Which brought me to the history of how did we come to have a 7 day week. The best resource for things like that is, of course, Wikipedia. Surprisingly, the page is not very long. But even as it is, it still mentions weeks used in different societies at different times. Have a look at it to learn about 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, 8-, 9-, and even 10-day weeks. It’s quite fun.

Given that time is very abstract, I find it interesting how tightly we hold on to a 7-day week standard.

Keep you blog posts dated. Always! Please.

I came across this article in Weblog Tools Collection, which asks the question of whether you should remove dates from your blog posts.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

While I appreciate a good habit of questioning best practices, I have a very strong feeling on this one.  Never ever ever remove dates from the articles and comments.  There is no such thing as “timeless content”.   Dates are always relevant.  Content easily outlives the author, the source, and anything that was considered “timeless” at the moment of writing.  Time is a very important dimension.  It is a crucial bit of metadata.  Don’t lose it.

And on top of that, don’t try to make that kind of decisions for your visitor.  It might appear rude and offensive.  Let the visitor decide for himself if he wants to click through to your article from the search engine or not.  Be transparent.  Always let the visitor know when the article was written, which times it refers to, and when it was commented.  Publish the date nearby.  Also use it in the URLs whenever possible.

Even structure your text to refer to specific time periods (“March 2010”, “July 4th, 1985”, “Stone Age”, etc).  Don’t use vague constructs like “yesterday”, “last year”, “when I was a child”.  You never know how your content will reach its audience.  Some people will find your article in full and on your site.  Some will see an excerpt in their RSS feeder.  Some will get just a quote emailed to them by a friend.   The context might change, and the “timeless”-ness can disappear.

If you are still not convinced, try a practical example.  Find some “timeless content” from before (last year, last decade, last century) and see how well it stands the test of times.  Now break it in pieces and look again.   Still there?  Still timeless?  Share your findings (both positive and negative) in the comments.

And in the meantime, keep your articles dated.

Time dimension to Google Maps

One thing that Google Maps could benefit from is a time dimension.  Imagine, being able to scroll the time-line while looking at the satellite picture of the same place.  You could see how cities are growing, roads built, and rain forests destroyed.  You could see traffic jams.  You could see how building shadows drop to find the better parking in a hot place like Cyprus…

I guess Google will have to collect much more data than they already have though.

The 20% rule

Sidenote: it seems this is the third post for today, and the third one that is somehow related to Google. This is not intentional.

It’s a wide known fact that Google allows (or, depending on how you look at it, forces) its employees to  work 20% of the time on the side projects.  What kind of projects?  What do they actually do?  Where this time goes?  Here is an idea from the hilarious article at Cracked.com:

Google engineers are given “20 percent time” in which they are free to pursue their own personal projects. This incentive has produced such efforts as Gmail, Google News, and 20% more employee masturbation.