A shared sense of time, I think, is a foundation achievement of a culture. It is a means to translate events into story (and eventually, history) and a framework for the relationships between all ideas. Before blogs and RSS, time on the web was hard to share in a widespread, public way.

Recently, I have been reflecting a lot on RSS (see my Why do you read sites via RSS? post), and I believe, at its core, RSS is an event data model. That is, RSS, more than anything, tracks events in time.

The marriage of RSS and weblogs has been so fruitful because, at their core, blogs are event logs. Blogs, not unlike web server logs, track events in time.

I believe weblogs and RSS are the most pervasive, public, system of time on the web to date. And, their combination has made an important contribution to the "human voice" on the web by providing a common time frame reference against which fragments of writing coalesce into larger stories.

That is, part of what makes the voice human is its modulation of urgency and importance. Impersonal corporate writing consistently is over-important (and untimely!), for example. Besides actual word usage, timing, or timeliness, is a quality of human communication. Blogs add timing to what is otherwise just text.

So, blog sites stand like clocks in town plazas, under which people gather to speak and listen. And, RSS has served as a conduit to carry the echos of those clocked events.

There are many Internet and web mechanisms for communicating time, and even all web pages have timestamp metadata that is not too hard to access. But, blogs and RSS basically hit you over the head with time information. I think many of us, probably unconsciously, check blog post timestamps before we read the post.

Time on the web is non-linear and non-contiguous. I think time is really like that in general, but one way we relate to others and the world is by conceiving of events as being in a linear and contiguous progression.

Blogs and RSS have been evolving a common cultural context of the web by giving so many people a shared, public, way to recognize (and respond to) the "new" dynamics of time on the web.