It’s weird. I was thinking last night if there was a way I could organize content without utilizing tags at all and it dawned on me that using a threaded approach would be one such way. Therefore if I looked at my blog journal, I would not only see my entire journal stream of content but also any threads on a particular stream of thought. Even more so I could filter those visible threads by a time frame so that I only see the more current ones, since older threads may not interest me anymore.
Even more so I wondered how could you show these thought streams, especially from the viewpoint of them intersecting and crisscrossing one another. Then it dawned on me that Flickr actually does this very well already. Your Flickr Sets and Groups are streams of photos that have been organized by topic. And best of all, you can actually see a small portion of each of these streams, as they crisscross each other, on the right sidebar area of Flickr. If this was duplicated in a journal blog, imagine being on a journal post and seeing the streams that these post belongs to on the side bar with the "previous" and "next" thoughts in the stream being showed for each stream. This is similar to what you see when you are browsing through a journal blog up near the top where it shows the previous and next posts relating to the post you are viewing, as well as a "Main" link, but you’d also add the previous and next posts for each thought stream (or topic) that this post relates to as well. Of course even if you could organize these thoughts streams by threading them, it would still be a good idea to create a title for the thought stream itself.
Something interesting to note though with this approach (that is similar to Flickr) is that all of your content does not need to be organized into these different streams but they can be just left in the global stream of thoughts if you want. Only if you notice a pattern in certain thoughts would you "grab" them and place them within their own thought stream (similar to how you can organize photos in Flickr in sets or groups). From a blog viewpoint, it would be not worrying about classifying and grouping every single minute thing but only the things that you notice having relationships or form patterns with one other.
