I would pay for this! It's common for blogs to go through a life cycle, and usually when you discover them they're already relative inactive. You can go through archives but there isn't good software support for making sure you see everything.
This would also be useful for going through historical incidents - e.g. replaying the top 10 politics blogs, day by day, during momentous events. It's simple enough to just treat it as an offset; the display would clearly say the original date of publication. This is a lot better than simply adding old RSS feeds since it comes in at the same rate it would have happened in the moment.
Something similar could be set up for newspapers. Imagine receiving all space-related stories from Life, NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, for the time period from say 1965-1970.
The current best version of this requires a huge amount of research into old newspapers, and also reading books and then manually connecting each book's timeline. If instead you could in parallel consume multiple sources, the correlation would be natural.
Even better would be adding in later commentary about those events.
Example: take "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and annotate each page with contemporary thought from each era. So every page would a section on what the scholarly response was when it came out, then 50 years later, then 100, each adding in new methods of investigation and validation/testing of the claims as archaeology, linguistics, carbon-dating, anthropology, etc. developed in the background.
This would also be useful for going through historical incidents - e.g. replaying the top 10 politics blogs, day by day, during momentous events. It's simple enough to just treat it as an offset; the display would clearly say the original date of publication. This is a lot better than simply adding old RSS feeds since it comes in at the same rate it would have happened in the moment.
Something similar could be set up for newspapers. Imagine receiving all space-related stories from Life, NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, for the time period from say 1965-1970.
The current best version of this requires a huge amount of research into old newspapers, and also reading books and then manually connecting each book's timeline. If instead you could in parallel consume multiple sources, the correlation would be natural.
Even better would be adding in later commentary about those events.
Example: take "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and annotate each page with contemporary thought from each era. So every page would a section on what the scholarly response was when it came out, then 50 years later, then 100, each adding in new methods of investigation and validation/testing of the claims as archaeology, linguistics, carbon-dating, anthropology, etc. developed in the background.