Does anyone have an opinion about when an update to a post should become its own post?
Frex, I wanted to note (via Matt Stinson, who deserves whatever little extra traffic I can throw his way) that Chait’s anti-Dean blog (mentioned here) has spawned an anti-Chait blog in its turn. This is a two day old post; does it make more sense to update and expect that people will read it or just new post it and get more self-referential?
If you want people to read the update, I find it’s best to make it a new post, unless the old post has gone into heavy link circulation.
Most people will only see what’s first, so any substantial changes to a post more than a day old should probably be noted. Simple corrections can be made and noted in the original post; egregious factual errors should probably be noted in a new post to make sure people see it. Of course, more and more people read blogs through RSS aggregators, and a good one such as NetNewsWire will show what changes you made to old posts anyway, so the issue may soon change.
What I’ve recently started to do is make a new post out of fresh information, but add an addendum to the orginal with a link pointing to the new one.