Your content needs a date!
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/clear-glass-with-red-sand-grainer-39396/
All too often, I come across blog posts, 'What's new?' sections and other content that doesn't show when the content was first published or last modified. I find this annoying. This information provides crucial context. It allows me to make certain assumptions and correctly place the content in a timeline.
It's like reading a changelog for software where the added, changed or removed features aren't attributed to the version where they changed. It's not helpful at all.
A political piece, written at the height of a scandal may omit crucial information. Which was first discovered months later. During the lengthy and boring police investigation. About which nobody writes in detail, of course. If I had a date next to the text, I could place the piece in the correct position on the timeline and explain to myself why certain arguments were not used or were simply wrong, but which may have represented the current knowledge at the time the piece was written.
Today I got curious about what happened to the german PC handbook publishing company Data Becker. And I found this blogpost (in german) by Thomas Vehmeier: Data Becker – eine Ära geht zu Ende (vehmeier.com). Apparently he worked at Data Becker in the middle of the 1990's. And in his text he writes about his experience and how & why Data Becker failed when the Internet, and therefore the market, began to change.
But.. There is no date. Nowhere. He also doesn't mention the year when Data Becker got out of business. Classical archaeological problem. We can only definitely say "It happened after the 1990's". But apart from that? Well he links to the WirtschaftsWoche. A german business magazine. They do a have date on their article. 9th October 2013. And they wrote that Data Becker will go out of business in 2014.
Does this clarify when his text was written? No, but it answers it somewhat sufficiently.
Albeit it illustrates my problem. Yes, it is not an unsolvable one, but still annoying - for me. And, I guess, I'm again in the minority here.
EDIT: I just re-read this article in August 2025 and now the blogpost from Thomas Vehmeier shows a date. 10th October 2013. Yai!