I don't particularly like the blog format. The central organizational feature of a blog is a timeline. The idea that something you said is "older" than some other thing is not a particularly useful relationship. Though you would probably like to hear if a particular idea had been updated.
I think something closer to a personal wiki would be better. All links to entries would be versioned so external links always point to the content they intended, but the entry would contain a link to an updated version if it exists.
I think having a medium where people tend to curate their content, rather than forgetting about it and moving on, would lead to higher quality content over time.
From reading the comments here, I keep thinking Stackexchange. A lot of people don't use SE this way, but it's possible to ask a question and right away answer it yourself, before submitting even. I do this sometimes when I learn something. Let the upvotes speak and mark the answer as "wiki" to make sure it's future-proof, so others can update outdated/bad info.
"I think something closer to a personal wiki would be better. All links to entries would be versioned so external links always point to the content they intended, but the entry would contain a link to an updated version if it exists."
I haven't seen a great implementation of this idea that also has a decent timeline view that people can subscribe to. Of course, if you don't care about people subscribing, then no problem, but if you are interested in that sort of relationship with people some "subscribable" is a necessity.
I've fiddled with trying to synthesize the timeline quasi-manually (think the space some wikis give you to say what a change is at the bottom), along with a checkbox that indicates the "minor change" ("don't put in the RSS feed"), but it's definitely something that only a handful of people are going to do because it's enough work to maintain one view of your content, maintaining two is even more.
It depends. There is value to having a progression of one's understanding and ideas and this is ideal for a blog. It can be technical or not. Obviously a post for the ages that one wants to craft over time and update should be its own page. It all depends on the purpose. If it is to learn by teaching, a blog is fine. Ideally new realizations would be added to the blog and linked to in the older articles.
I agree. Blogs were designed to be "web logs", after all, and I think in a lot of cases trying to shoehorn technical writing into a blog's inherently journal-like format is a bad idea.
I much prefer it when people simply maintain a "writing" page with articles grouped by topic rather than their (rather arbitrary) age.
I've been writing a blog locally that I haven't published since I don't feel I have an article that's really polished yet - but my plan was to publish in the blog format and also do a good job of categorizing my articles and indexing them, sort of like this: http://www.gwern.net/index
I think something closer to a personal wiki would be better. All links to entries would be versioned so external links always point to the content they intended, but the entry would contain a link to an updated version if it exists.
I think having a medium where people tend to curate their content, rather than forgetting about it and moving on, would lead to higher quality content over time.