Tips (rules?) for Open Notebook Science

I recently decided to give open notebook science a try. In order for my lab notebook to be useful to others, I've gotta to put a little extra effort into making my notebook more understandable to outsiders. I think a lab notebook will never and perhaps should never be as easy to understand as a paper, since you want to spend most of your time doing science rather than making beautiful figures and writing stunning introductions. I would simply like to reach the point where someone in a similar field to me could pick up my notebook and understand it without too much effort.

I'm trying to catalog some basic ideas that would promote better open notebooks, with better defined as:

1. searchable
2. understandable
3. dependable (i.e. small software failures won't forever zap all of your results)
   

Here's what I've come up with so far. Please comments if you think of other tips.

• use some sort of version control system (wiki, cvs, subversion)
• this is particularly important if you have an electronic only lab notebook as it creates a time stamp for everything you enter into the notebook, which would be important for patents and other legal stuff
• it also allows you to go back and look at previous versions
• backup your notebook
• with cvs or subversion back up your repository
• with wiki's this becomes wiki specific, so check the documentation for your wiki
  
• organize hierarchically
• break the notebook into sections
• break the sections into subsections
• remember to include a time stamp in the text of your notebook at the beginning of each new experiment you do and at the beginning of each section you start
  
• introduce every section giving the bigger picture (not too long, just a paragraph or so on the big idea); a nice figure would be useful too since many scientists prefer skimming figures to skimming text
  
• if a section is complete or dead (i.e. you've abandoned the project), state so very prominently at the start of the section. If the work was published, provide a reference. If the work was abandoned, perhaps explain why.
• also if a section hasn't been touched for a long while, you might add something like "This chapter is not being actively worked on"
  
• link to raw data when and where you mention it in your notebook
• remember the notebook is public, so be careful not to say stuff that might offend sensitive ears or sensitive scientists
• include high quality images in your documents; things like agarose gels will need to be zoomed in a lot to be inspected in detail; if you convert your full resolution tiff to low-quality jpeg, it'll just look like pixelated blah. Then again, you can't always use full-size images, particularly from a high megapixels camera, because the notebook will quickly become giant; so here is my suggestion:
  
• if the image is small (<1mb)>
• if it is huge but detail doesn't matter, include a decent resolution image that can be zoomed in 2-4x and still look nice
• if it is huge and detail matters, include a decent resolution image, but also include a link to the full size image like you would for other raw data
  
• construct the document in such a way that it is easily indexed by search engines (otherwise no one will find your results; people probably wont read your lab notebook for fun)
• the above statement difficult to comply with if you use pdfs because Google currently only indexes the first few hundred kbytes of a pdf; my lab manual is 30MB

please let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions about these rules.