If all I'm doing is correcting a typo or a formatting problem, I don't worry about it. If I'm changing content, however, I try to indicate it in one of two ways: (1) using <del> tags for deleted content and italic or boldface for additional material, or (2) adding an "Update" at the bottom of the post, dating it, and adding the new material there.

Rebecca Blood addresses this in her Weblog Handbook; the "party line" from blogging pioneers seems to be that once it's published, it shouldn't be changed without indication to the reader that something has been modified.

I tweak liberally: it's my blog! Voyeurs and conversation partners are kept on their toes. As for documentary, well, we are free to write fiction in here - and many do. (Blogs such as this and this, for example.) Wasn't there also a blog (can't find URL, sorry) by a fictitious teenager with a deadly disease, who proceeded to die and was then revealed a hoax? That unsettled quite a few people, from what I remember. My point is, within the realm of fakeable blog information, timestamps are the least of it...

I'm not sure ethics enter into it necessarily. It depends on the stated purpose of the blog. I'm certain that many would be unsettled if Dear Raed turned out to be fake after all.

Hmm, now you've given me a fiction-y idea... searching archives to get more of a story, over time, could make a reader acutely aware of chronology...

Eek. Apparently, HTML isn't allowed in comments. The first "this" was http://www.livejournal.com/users/grunk/ -- and the second "this" was http://www.livejournal.com/users/sargent/ .

I do exactly what you describe: taking the contradictory step of "publishing" a "draft" of an entry, then editing for form and content.

I do so, in part, because I don't like the cramped little box Movable Type gives you to compose your entry. It's easier for me to edit once I see it in its close-to-final form, spread out on the page.

As for the ethics of such changes or the editorial responsibility to track them, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, it's not like blogs are critical editions that necessitate full annotation of any and all changes made. On the other hand, if one is engaged in a debate or conversation, it would be deceitful to go back post-facto and change what you've written. You can't do that, for example, on a listserv, to reference a previous entry of yours:
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000038.html

However, what about other changes you might make to your blog? Jerome McGann has argued that "bibliographic codes" should be treated with as much scholarly attention as "linguistic codes." If you change the font, or the background color, or the header, or the address, should these changes be noted explicitly with as much care as the "linguistic" changes you might make? These issues seem less clear.

Blog flutter seems as good a phrase as any. A similar phenomenon plagues the message boards that I troll - how inconvenient when sixteen flaming posts appear only to discover that the victim-text has disappeared save the mocking "edited" marker left behind. In fact, some boards cut their editing time from a lengthy 90 minutes to a measly ten or fifteen for this very reason. Occasionally, folks I know even take screen shots of particularly juicy messages just to prevent intentional trolling and revoking (sparking, by the way, another phenomenon - faked screenshots).

As an aside (as if this wasn't one entire aside to begin with), if I followed Liz's suggestions for proper blog etiquette, I would probably render most of my passages unreadable. I'm a big fan of the edit button. Perhaps stemming from years of web design, but I often make good use of the reload button combined with a healthy dose of minor consecutive changes.

MovableType seems particularly tricky, because the owner can edit whatever they might like, but once I post a comment, it's there for good.

Like so.

I tend not to edit too much. I like the idea of using the blog to preserve my ideas as they happen. Part of that grows out of my interest in temporality (especially in film). Usually, what I'll do is add a comment (sometimes two or three), in which I reconsider what I've already said. I'll likely use the "Update" method in future blogs, though, since not everyone reads the comments. BTW, I'm intrigued by George's questions about font color and background color, too. I've been thinking about changing my template and have been wondering how that might "change" what I've already written. Lots of really interesting questions here.

You touch upon an interesting point when you say that blogs are a documentary genre. I'm ambivalent about changing posts.

In the past, the address of my blog was once published online for an article that I wrote. I decided to remove one of my more vulgar posts, because the website was primarily directed at youth between 13-18.

For the most part, my posts are only set in stone about 30 min. after I post them. Or as soon as they've been commented on or trackbacked, because then it becomes part of a greater dialogue.

That just sparked a thought, about the importance of commenting and trackbacks. By doing so, you hold the author accountable for what they've said. Hmm.

Hi - found you via an entry on jill/txt (http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/) about your wipe effect. I've been thinking about blog flutter (good term) recently, so it was fun to come here and find out that you've both defined and named it. I edit published entries a lot, partly for the same reason George does - I like to see what it looks like on the page before I start chopping it up - and partly because most of my entries are emotional responses to events, and it takes me a day or to get far enough away from my response to realize that nobody's going to want to read my overblown prose, and I'd better start to edit it down to the essentials of the story.

I know that my audience is very small, so issues of accountability haven't really come up to haunt me.

I consider an entry to be a snapshot of a particular thought at a particular juncture in time and space. I will correct a typo or formatting problem, but I have never and will never change the content of an entry.

Yes, it's a private enterprise, but it's published in a public space. For people who do not understand how those two things will play out via their blog, this can be problematic. However, I maintain that the place to sort that issue is in your own mind, and not in the blog. Just because the type is moveable doesn't mean it should, in fact, be moved.

Think now, post later.