Time of day means little on the web
Erik Naggum makes a good point here, in the essay I linked to earlier:
It is amusing that when people specify a time, they tend to forget that they looked at their watches or asked other time-keeping devices at a particular geographic location. The value they use for “current time” is colored by this location so much that the absence of a location at which we have the current time, renders it completely useless — it could be specified in any one of the about 30 (semantically different) timezones employed around the planet. This is particularly amusing with statements you find on the web:
This page was updated 7/10/99 2:00 AM.This piece of information is amazingly useless, yet obviously not so to the person who knows where the machine is located and who wrote it in the first place. Only by monitoring for changes to this statement does it have any value at all. Specifications of time often has this purpose, but the belief that they carry information, too, is quite prevalent. The only thing we know about this time specification is that it was made in the past, which may remove most of the ambiguity, but not quite all — it could be 1999-07-10.
Despite this, a lot of websites specify the time of day something was published. The thing is, unless you’re geared to a specific audience (your closest friends, say, or the people in a country with only one timezone) or the audience has the ability to set timezone themselves (as on most forums), this is basically useless information.
If you do have an international audience, and you feel the need to specify the time of day something was published, you could always revert to the classic relative time: 5 hours ago tells me something, but 12:30 AM doesn’t.
