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On Firday, we proposed a new chart for showing project plans. I chose an ugly name for it and called it Gantt Box Chart.

Essentially, a gantt box chart is what you get when a gantt chart and box plot go to a bar, get drunk and decide to make out. It shows the project plan like any other gantt chart, and it shows the distribution of activity end dates, like any other box plot.

You can see an example gantt box chart for a fictional software project above.

Today, we will learn how to create a similar chart in Excel. Get a steaming cup of coffee or whatever keeps you going and follow these simple steps to make a gantt box chart.

[Read this post if you want to know what GBC is and how to read it]

1. Set up your data:

Just like any other chart in excel, a gantt box chart too requires well structured data. In our case, we need 5 things.

1. Activity name
2. Start Date
3. Best Case End Date
4. Realistic (or Plan) End Date
5. Worst Case End Date

Getting all the 3 variations of End dates can be tricky. But if you are managing projects for long, you might already know how to get these dates. Otherwise, here is one approach, proposed by Joel Spolsky, called as Evidence Based Scheduling that can help you.

We will also need 3 additional helper columns where we need to calculate some numbers so that our gantt box chart can be constructed without resorting to magic wands. These are,

1. BC: Number of days between Start Date and Best Case End Date
2. R: Number of days between Best Case End Date and Realistic Date
3. W: Number of days between Realistic Date and Worst Case End Date

2. Create a Stacked Bar Chart

Add a new stacked bar chart. The series to be stacked are,

1. Best case end date
2. R
3. W

Use the “Activity Name” column for category axis labels.

Now, our chart should look like:

3. Say your favorite curse word and Reverse the categories

Ok, time for a minor annoyance. Excel has magically showed the first activity of project at bottom. So, we need to reverse the category axis values before any further.

Just select the category axis, go to format axis (press CTRL+1) and click the little box that says “order reverse in Categories”.

Now, the chart should look like this:

4. Add Error Bars to Best Case Series

Now, add error bars to the best case series of the chart so that it looks like a line is drawn connecting best case date to start date of each activity. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Select “best case end date” series.
2. Add Error Bars (from format ribbon)
3. Specify the type of error bar as “Negative only”
4. Select “Custom” for error bar values
5. Now, point the error bar values to the helper column “BC”
6. Format the error bar in such a way that no cap is shown and it is thick.

At this point, our gantt box chart should look like this:

5. Finally, format the chart

Now, our gantt box chart is almost ready. But it is still ugly. We need not hire a Hollywood grade make-up man to beautify this. We just need a few clicks.

1. Remove legend
2. Add vertical and horizontal grid lines. Make them subtle.
3. Change text colors to soothing ones.
4. Remove fills from all series in stacked bar chart.
5. Apply borders to 2nd and 3rd series to create a box effect.
6. Format the date axis,
   1. Adjust the starting point (unfortunately you have to enter the number equivalent of date, like 1-May-2010 as 40299)
   2. Adjust major unit – I used 14 days, you can try something else depending on overall project length.
   3. Set the axis number formatting to d-mmm or mmm or myy or something else that works for you.
7. Add a chart title

That is all. Our Gantt Box Chart is finally ready. Now, go figure why your project is not on track and do something about it.

Displaying Completed Activities:

The easiest way to show completed activities is to change all 3 end dates to the same date: that of the actual end date. This way, you just see a line when an activity is done and a box when there are variations in end dates.

Of course, you can use another helper column to show a vertical line or a symbol of your choice to denote the end point as well. I leave it to you to figure out that portion.

Download the Gantt Box Chart Template:

I have prepared an excel template for creating Gantt Box Charts quickly. Go ahead and download the version that you want.

Excel 2007+ version | Excel 2003 version

Here is a mirror with both files as a zip. Go on, be awesome

Share your experiences of using Gantt Box Chart:

If you like this chart and implementing it in one of your projects, do tell me how it went. Or just share your thoughts on this implementation and any suggestions. Go ahead and share.

Templates & Tutorials on Project Management:

• Excel Gantt Chart Template
• Project Milestones – Timeline Template
• Project Status Dashboard Template
• More resources on using Excel for Project Management

Project Management Template Set – Get a copy today

I have made a set of 24 templates that take care of various activities in a project right from planning to time sheets to issues to project status reporting thru dashboards. These templates have been bought by more than 500 project managers all over the world and they are saving hours of time every week using these templates.

Go ahead and a get a copy of my project management templates.

There’s something about trees that gets to me. I’m not sure exactly what it is but something about their shape, majesty, intricacy and symbolism draws me to them as photographic subjects. Today I spent a couple of hours surfing through Flickr, particularly looking for Tree images (some OF trees and others that just include them in some important way). Here’s some that caught my attention - many of which are even more beautiful large (click to see them bigger).

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

21 Impressive Tree Images

Some have embraced it, some have discarded it as too far in the future, and some have abandoned a misused friend in favor of an old flame in preparation. Whatever side of the debate you’re on, you’ve most likely heard all the blogging chatter surrounding the “new hotness” that is HTML5. It’s everywhere, it’s coming, and you want to know everything you can before it’s old news.

Things like jQuery plugins, formatting techniques, and design trends change very quickly throughout the Web community. And for the most part we’ve all accepted that some of the things we learn today can be obsolete tomorrow, but that’s the nature of our industry.

When looking for some stability, we can usually turn to the code itself as it tends to stay unchanged for a long time (relatively speaking). So when something comes along and changes our code, it’s a big deal; and there are going to be some growing pains we’ll have to work through. Luckily, rumor has it, that we have one less change to worry about.

In this article, I’m hoping to give you some tips and insight into HTML5 to help ease the inevitable pain that comes with transitioning to a slightly different syntax.

Welcome to HTML5.

What are the basics?

The DOCTYPE

When I first started researching HTML5 a few months ago, one of the main things I struggled to find was the doctype. A simple thing, you’d think it would be everywhere, but after much frustration, I finally found it buried within w3.org and here it is:

<!DOCTYPE html>

I was also curious why they chose to “html” rather than “html5″, it seemed like the logical way to tell a browser that the current document was written in HTML5, and offered a good template for the future. But I found that <!DOCTYPE html5> triggers Quirks Mode in IE6, and when taking backwards compatibility into consideration <!DOCTYPE html> is a pretty good choice (in my opinion).

Overall, I really like the new DOCTYPE; it’s small, meaningful, and maybe we’ll actually be able to remember this one by heart and not have to paste it from site to site.

New Elements you should know

At first glance, with HTML5, the new elements immediately jump out and command attention. The W3C really listened to the community and planned for the future when architecting the abundance of new elements available. We have everything from basic structural elements like <header> and <footer> to others like <canvas> and <audio> that tap into, what seems to be, a very powerful API which allows us the freedom to create more user-friendly applications while further distancing ourselves from reliance on Flash for saving data and intense animation.

The new structural elements

• <header>
  The header element contains introductory information to a section or page. This can involve anything from our normal documents headers (branding information) to an entire table of contents.
• <nav>
  The nav element is reserved for a section of a document that contains links to other pages or links to sections of the same page. Not all link groups need to be contained within the <nav> element, just primary navigation.
• <section>
  The section element represents a generic document or application section. It acts much the same way a <div> does by separating off a portion of the document.
• <article>
  The article element represents a portion of a page which can stand alone such as: a blog post, a forum entry, user submitted comments or any independent item of content.
• <aside>
  Aside, represents content related to the main area of the document. This is usually expressed in sidebars that contain elements like related posts, tag clouds, etc. They can also be used for pull quotes.
• <footer>
  The footer element is for marking up the footer of, not only the current page, but each section contained in the page. So, it’s very likely that you’ll be using the <footer> element multiple times within one page.

When you take a look at these new elements, it looks like they’re just replacing our common DIV IDs; and in a way, it’s true. But, the diagram below shows that elements like <header> and <footer> can be used more than once on a single page where they behave more like classes and normal HTML elements that you can use over and over again to retain a semantic structure.

Elements like <header> and <footer> are not just meant to represent the top and bottom of the current document, but they also represent the <header> and <footer> of each document section, much the way we use <thead> and <tfoot> in data tables.

The benefits of using these structural elements is mainly due to the fact that they are extremely well defined and provide a great way to semantically structure your document. However, these elements do need to be used with some careful thought because they can, very easily be overused.

Further Reading on structural HTML5

• Steve Smith on Structural Tags in HTML5
• Lachlan Hunt’s Preview of HTML5
• Elliot Harold on New Elements in HTML5
• Bruce Lawson’s HTML5 Form Demo

Easing the transition from XHTML

Even though HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, & HTML5 are all very similar there are some small syntax differences that can, very easily, slip past anyone and invalidate code. Keeping this in mind, HTML5 has some built-in “slack” to make the transition a little easier.

For example, when marking up a form in HTML5, this is the proper syntax for an input text element:

<input type="text" id="name">

But this is also accepted as valid code in an attempt to ease the pain for avid XHTML coders (like myself) who are used to self-closing elements:

<input type="text" id="name"/>

The same rules apply to <meta> and other self closing elements. Legacy elements like <b> and <i> were also left in to help those coming over from HTML 4.01.l

What are the benefits?

With any new technology there has to be benefit; why else would you use it? If your old code works just as well and efficient as the new code there’s no reason to upgrade. No reason at all, trust me, I checked.

Luckily HTML5 is packed with cool new features, code slimming techniques and a lot of stuff I would call very large benefits. Most of which circle around the new APIs and the DOM tree.

Extending the API

The most obvious benefit built into HTML5 is the numerous APIs and the opportunities it opens up for the future of web apps with Holy Grail of application cache and offline capabilities. Google Gears gave us offline data storage and Flash introduced us to the power of application cache (Pandora uses it to save your log in information). With HTML5, these capabilities are now available to use right in the language and can easily be expanded with JavaScript.

HTML5 relies on light scripting to flex its muscles on the Web; this is very possibly the first time, other than jQuery, that one (front-end) technology has fully acknowledged another. Sure, we connect them with classes and IDs but up until now, they have been perceived as separate layers by the principles of progressive enhancement. But as the Web grows we need unity like this across the Web.

Offline Data Storage

The coolest part about HTML5 is definitely its offline capabilities. Programs like Thunderbird and Outlook (and now GMail to an extent) let you browse through your old data while staying offline. With HTML5, you’ll have this same functionality, but in the browser. This is the first serious step towards bridging the gap between the desktop and the Web, and opens all sorts of doors for the future of Web apps.

The W3C has taken the best parts from the various Web technologies and rolled them into, what is being dubbed the most powerful markup language to date.

Some other of the HTML5 APIs

• Drag & Drop
  The drag and drop API defines an event-based drag and drop system. However, it never defines what “drag and drop” is. This API requires JavaScript to fully work as normal think drag and drop functionality.
• Video & Audio
  The audio & video APIs are massive upgrades in media embedding. Although support is limited right now, something like video embedding has never been easier:

  <video width="400" height="360" src="vid.mp4">

• Geolocation
  Geolocation is a very cool API available within HTML5. Its object can be used to programmatically determine location information through a device’s user agent (hint hint: mobile devices).

Further reading on the HTML5 API

• Offline Web Applications
• Offline Application Caching
• Remy Sharp on JavaScript APIs HTML5 (presentation)
• O3D Beach Demo from Google (must have an HTML5 capable browser)

Where can I use it?

Even with the very limited support for HTML5, the Web is far too progressive to not create a testing environment for us to play around. Currently, Safari is our best testing platform, as it supports most of the new elements and APIs. Of course, that may change at anytime so keep and eye on Opera, Chrome and Firefox as well.

Normally you might think since Safari is a Webkit browser, by default, all Webkit browsers would support the same elements, unfortunately, this isn’t the case. While many of the HTML5 features are supported across the board in Webkit browsers, there are some, like <video>, that are not.

Mobile devices

To effectively use HTML5 right now, we need to be able to control the environment in which it is used. Since support is not as widespread as we’d like it doesn’t make real sense for it to be heavily used unless, of course, we can lock down the usage to certain platforms which have HTML5 support. With Webkit leading the way for HTML5, we can safely focus on devices powered by Webkit.

The 3 hottest mobile devices right now: The Palm Pre, iPhone 3Gs and the new Google Android phone all have browsers that are based off the Webkit rendering engine.

Safari is even leading the way on the mobile HTML5 front; The iPhone (with the latest software upgrade) is the only device I could get to properly render the <audio> element. Because these devices are so young and all use the same rendering engine, the likelihood of them pushing a rapid software upgrade is pretty high.

Right now, you can confidently use many of the HTML5 features in iPhone Web app development and mostly likely expect Pre and Android to follow in suit.

Further reading on where you can use HTML5

• HTML5 Features in latest iPhone
• GMail Web app for the iPhone
• GMail for HTML5
• Supported Features in HTML5
• HTML5 Cheat Sheet

How can we move forward?

Even with all the recent hype surrounding HTML5 and how we all want to use it, it is still going to be a very slow transition away from HTML4.01 & XHTML1.0. It will take time to get developers up to speed, test all the features, waiting for all the :ahem: browsers to catch up, and it will take an especially long time for users to transition out of those old browsers. With all that in mind, we know who we are, we’re all reading this article (I’ve read it about 30 times so far) and we know we have to find a legitimate way to move forward without damaging the past.

We can’t make the full switch yet and there’s no use at this point pointing out who is holding up the show. We all know that any responsible developer would not drop support for a browser that is still heavily used. So rather than yell at a brick wall, here are some things I’ve found that might help us move forward in a positive way:

Semantic DIV naming

Semantically aligning your DIV names with that of the new HTML5 elements will help you get used to the names themselves and also the new functionality and nesting that they want you to do with the <header> and <footer> elements. These are akin to learning the intro the Enter Sandman (for the guitarist out there); it’s not very difficult, but it takes a little practice to get it to feel natural.

Before jumping in full-force to HTML5 production sites, I recommend trying the soft transition with changing your DIV names slightly. There’s no downside that I’ve found to doing this, you can even use the new DOCTYPE with very little consequence.

Faking it with JavaScript

First off, I’d like to say: Please don’t do this in production. If the client side scripting fails, it will completely collapse the site in browsers that won’t take CSS applied to the new elements. This is simply not a good option. It is, however, an option and I’m all about knowing your options no matter what they are.

Creating the new elements with JavaScript

Working in jQuery is cool and all, but as it turns out, there is a built in function to JavaScript to deal with creating new elements:

document.createElement('header');
document.createElement('footer');
document.createElement('section');
document.createElement('aside');
document.createElement('nav');
document.createElement('article');
document.createElement('figure');
document.createElement('time');

…and so on in that fashion.

This will allow you to style these elements in Internet Explorer. Again, the downside of using this technique is that, without the all-important JavaScript, the site will not only be unstyled, all the unrecognized elements will default to inline. So your site will literally collapse on itself.

Client side JavaScript is not the answer for using HTML5. Server side javascript, now that’s a completely different story…

Building browser-specific apps

I’ve always promoted building sites for your audience, so depending on your audience, building browser-specific applications may be a real option. As I mentioned above, it’s all about controlling the environment, if we can control the environment we can control features delivered to the user much better. Google is currently attempting to do this with Google Wave.

The idea behind Google’s new monster product is to revolutionize communication, and do so with the newest technology. Google Wave is built in HTML5 and isn’t usable in all browsers yet. But that’s alright since they’re controlling the audience by only releasing it to select developers for testing.

With Wave, Google is pushing HTML5 as far as it will go (and even a little further). They are taking blogs, wikis, instant messaging, e-mail and synchronous communication to the next level by combining them into place.

Here is what the Wave inbox looks like.

Below is a sort of wiki/chat area with all sorts of real-time communication treats for you to check out (once they release it).

Google Wave being powered by HTML5 is definitely the biggest step forward we have seen in this area. They have done a phenomenal job putting together a creative and innovative product.

Focusing on the mobile

Just like Google is currently doing with Wave by selectively releasing it to developers, we can control the viewing environment when working with mobile devices. By grabbing the user agent, we can design specific applications that use HTML5 for supported devices.

Targeting the user agent of a device is not an ideal method in designing for the general mobile web, but when we need to specifically target a device, like the iPhone, Pre or Google’s Android it’s a pretty solid option.

Right now, the best mobile testing platform we have is the iPhone. With the recent software upgrade, it is very close to having full support. But, if you just want to use the new elements, most any of the big 3 mobile platforms will work fine. If you’re looking for API support I suggest testing on the iPhone with the new upgraded software.

Conclusion

With the strong foundations set up by previous versions of (X)HTML and large community activity surrounding Web standards, we’re coming into a new age with a wealth of knowledge and the ability to learn from our past mistakes (and make some new ones). HTML5 is being set up with the expectations of a very powerful markup language and it’s up to us to utilize it in a way that can benefit us all.

There are so many great features to look forward to from new elements to tons of killer APIs. We can make data available offline, easily combine technologies and create very intricate animations all within a familiar landscape. If you have the time, I encourage you to browse through the entire spec and familiarize yourself even further with all the bells and whistles (there are a lot) so we can use HTML5 to build stronger, richer Web applications for years to come.

Here’s to HTML5, let’s hope it lives up to the hype.

Resources

• 23 Essential HTML 5 Resources
  A comprehensive list of articles and resources related to HTML 5.
• HTML5 Demos
  HTML5 Demos is a great resource for checking out the HTML5 APIs such as: geolocation, drag and drop, offline detection, and storage. This is a very good and unique resources to test out and see exactly with we can do with HTML5.
• HTML5 Gallery
  The HTML5 Gallery, like any gallery, is a web site showcase where you can see how others are using HTML5 in every day development. I’ve looked round though this site quite a bit and did some cross browser testing on some of the entries. Many are broken in older browsers, but there are some that hold up very well.
• HTML5 Doctor
  A resource that catered for the people who wished to find out more about implementing HTML5 and how to go about it. This blog publishes articles relating to HTML5 and it’s semantics and how to use them, here and now.
• HTML5 Cheat Sheet
  A handy printable HTML 5 Cheat Sheet that lists all currently supported tags, their descriptions, their attributes and their support in HTML 4. Released here, at Smashing Magazine.
• W3C HTML5 Spec Overview
  Whenever you want to know
  about something that no one has written about on the Web, the W3C is your answer. I spent hours scouring this site in researching HTML5. It’s a great resource and I highly recommend reading through whatever you can.
• HTML5 Validator
  Even with such little support, we still want to make sure our code is valid. Validating your code is a great way to learn and ease yourself into developing with HTML5.
• WHATWG Wiki
  The HTML Working Group has put together some great documentation for tracking what exactly is going on in the world of HTML5.

References

• Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!
• W3C HTML5 Differences
• 5 Amazing HTML5 Features to Look Forward to
• Preview of HTML5
• Preparing for HTML5 with Semantic Class Names
• XHTML2 vs. HTML5
• HTML4 vs. HTML5
• Accessibility in HTML5
• HTML5 Doctor

About the Author

Tim Wright is a web designer/developer and blogger. He has been an advocate for Web standards and accessibility since 2004. You can find more of his writing at CSSKarma or follow Tim on Twitter.

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© Tim Wright for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 44 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: future, html 5, html5, web

Der eco Verband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft e.V. hat den Leitfaden „eco Richtlinie für zulässiges E-Mail-Marketing“ in einer aktualisierten Version vorgestellt. Die Broschüre ist unter http://www.eco.de/onlinemarketing kostenlos zum Download verfügbar.

„Als Laie wie als Profi kann man leicht folgenschwere Fehler machen, wenn man Anforderungen, die sich aus der aktuellen Rechtsprechung – wie z.B. dem  Payback-Urteil des BGH – ergeben, übersieht. Aber auch das Thema Co-Sponsoring muss genauer unter die Lupe genommen werden“, sagt Rechtsanwalt Sven Karge, eco Fachbereichsleiter Content. „Deswegen sollten sich Unternehmen, die E-Mail-Marketing betreiben, in regelmäßigen Abständen juristisch beraten lassen, um auf dem neuesten Stand zu sein und möglichen Problemen vorzubeugen.“

Unterstützung bieten auch die Experten des eco auf der Fachmesse komma in München. Die Rechtsanwälte Sven Karge, Frank Ackermann und Ivo Ivanov informieren am Mittwoch, 21.01.2009, um 15.15 Uhr in einem Fachvortrag zum Thema „E-Mail-Marketing - wie Ihr Newsletter wirklich beim Empfänger ankommt”. Auf dem eco Stand (Halle 2, A 10) stehen die Experten auch für persönliche Gespräche zur Verfügung.

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In einem lesenswerten Blog-Beitrag mit dem Titel Der Trend zum Tiefen-Blogger greift Wolfgang Sommergut ein Thema auf, mit dem sich viele Blogger einmal beschäftigen sollten. Der Beitrag schlägt eigentlich in die gleiche Kerbe wie unser früherer Beitrag Blogs als Parasiten. Jeder Blogger wünscht sich ein gut mit Beiträgen gefülltes Blog. Viele neigen jedoch dazu, Beiträge eher beiläufig und ohne besonderen redaktionellen Aufwand zu posten. Sie führen im Grunde ein öffentliches Notizbuch, in dem sie Gedanken, Bemerkungen, Reviews, Links und aufgeschnappte News ansammeln. Die Beiträge sind meist kurz, nicht selten telegrammstilartig und in der Regel nicht sehr sorgfältig ausformuliert. Das ist bei heruntergeschraubtem literarischem Anspruch allerdings noch vergleichsweise spannend, verglichen mit den vielen Blogbeiträgen, deren Inhalte lediglich aus anderen Quellen zusammenkopiert sind, oder die nur von Content-Syndication-Scripts automatisch generierte Ware darstellen.

Wolfgang Sommergut sieht einen neuen Trend in der Blogosphäre: immer mehr Blogger vermeiden den Selbstanspruch, im Alleingang ein komplettes News-Organ anbieten zu wollen. Stattdessen wird das Blog lieber benutzt, um „wertige“ Artikel anzusammeln, die auch nicht im Stundentakt erscheinen müssen. Ein wichtiger, diskussionsauslösender Beitrag zu dieser Thematik ist sicherlich der Anfang Juli 2007 erschienene Beitrag Write Articles, Not Blog Postings von Altmeister Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen fordert von einem Blogger, dass dieser in irgendeiner Disziplin, auf irgendeinem Gebiet der Beste sein sollte, einer, der seinen Bereich besser durchdringt als alle anderen, der darin souverän Akzente setzen kann und dem „man“, also die Masse, eine Führungsrolle auf seinem Gebiet zuerkennt. Denn egal ob menschliche Leser oder täuschungserfahrene Suchmaschinen-Spider: sie sind auf der Suche nach originärem Content, also nach dem, was nur ein richtiger Autor erschaffen kann.

Gerade der wohl bekannteste Viel-Poster der deutschsprachigen Blogosphäre, Robert Basic, wird von Wolfgang Sommergut als Beispiel-Kandidaten für den Trend oder zumindest den Wunsch nach mehr inhaltlicher Tiefe angeführt. Mit seinem Beitrag Tiefe und Bloggen, der Ende Juli 2007 erschien, erweckt Robert tatsächlich den Eindruck, als ob er der typischen Oberflächlichkeit eines gewöhnlichen Blogs ziemlich überdrüssig sei. Er träumt von einem Webprojekt, das irgendwo zwischen Blog, Wiki und statischer Dokumentation angesiedelt ist, und dessen Inhalt eine fachlich fundierte, zusammenhängende Vermittlung der Materie rund ums Web 2.0 ist. Eine Art SELFHTML also für das Know How jenseits der Web-Basistechnologien, realisiert auf einer hochgradig produktiven Webanwendung, die zwanglos chronologisches Publizieren mit gründlich systematischem Publizieren zwanglos und gründlich vereint ;-)

Doch verläuft der Trend zu mehr inhaltlichem Tiefgang nicht konträr zur Philosophie von Web 2.0? Schließlich wird dort allenthalben User generated Content propagiert. Die Antwort lautet: Nein. Der Widerspruch löst sich, wenn man bedenkt, dass User generated Content etwas anderes ist als reine Interaktion mit anderen Benutzern. User generated Content steht für spontan mögliches Publizieren im Web, nicht für das Gebrabbel, Dampfgeplauder und Gezänk in manchen Diskussionsforen oder Kommentarschlachten. Auch wenn er über Web-Formulare eingespeist wurde, so ist es doch Content, wobei man darunter durchaus wieder das verstehen darf, was wir zuvor als originären, autoren-orientierten Content bezeichnet haben. Könnte man also die Prognose wagen, dass der Trend zu mehr Tiefgang auch den User generated Content erfassen wird? Unsere Antwort lautet: Ja. Die immer weiter wachsenden Qualitätsansprüche an Wikipedia-Autoren weisen deutlich in diese Richtung. Zwar muss man zwischen dem redaktionellem Anspruch eines Wikipedia-Artikels und dem eines Freizeitfreund-Profils auf einer Social-Networking-Plattform unterscheiden. Doch auch dort werden sich Profile und andere Inhalte durchsetzen, die nicht aus Unsicherheit woanders abgekupfert wurden, sondern die Temperament und Persönlichkeit ihrer Urheber glaubhaft in Text und Multimedia übersetzen.

Man kann allerdings einwänden, dass es sich beim „Tiefen-Bloggen“ gar nicht um einen neuen Trend handelt, sondern einfach nur um einen alten Hut, der mal wieder neu entdeckt wurde. Schon immer wurde nach mehr Tiefgang gerufen, wenn das Gewässer zu seicht zu werden drohte. Und seicht wird es, wenn Wahrnehmung und Denken in spotlightartig Vordergründigem und wahllos Tagesaktuellem zu versacken drohen. Im Trend zum Tiefen-Blogging verbirgt sich also der Wunsch nach einer erklärenden Zusammenhänglichkeit, wie sie nur von einem Autor kraft seiner Autorität geschaffen werden kann.