I posted this on Facebook a year ago. Worth saving.
I've got a new product designed in my mind. Now I have to get it to appear in software. The idea is this -- I am going to tell a story over many hours or days, even years, and keep coming back to it, maybe a month from now, with a new idea to add.
It should of course be easy for me to do this, but it should also pop up on the radar of people who follow me. In context, along with all the other stuff I've written on this topic.
And -- key point -- I must be able to reorganize it at any time to make a coherent story for a newcomer. Simple reverse-chronology is not good enough.
Any smart media organization with long-term aspirations should embrace this.
My own hope is to someday be able to post to the blog, click on something like a bookmarklet, and have the post or a part of it be added to a chapter or long-form piece I'm writing over time. I would only edit the blog post if there was an error, but I would want to edit the longform version freely. As you say, have a way for readers to know that there is something new in the longform piece. And if it's a bookmarklet, be free to capture quotations from other people's writing to add to the longform piece. Maybe a little star appears on the blog post indicating that it now also appears as part of a longform piece, linked through the star. It's fun to muse about writing a blog and harvesting the best of it for other uses in a more practical way than I have now.