Nobody thinks about date formats. There are two you should be using in nearly all cases (other than when you want to make a friendly display to humans):

- ISO8601 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601), which is relatively easy to prase, handles edge cases like timezones and similar gracefully, sorts numerically, and has great support in most languages. Specifically, the best format to use is usually the "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss +Z" one.

- TAI64 (http://cr.yp.to/libtai/tai64.html) if you need more precision than ISO8601.

It is a nice idea. But I think writing Logs as JSON is still a lot more practical.

The idea of writing Logs as JSON has been out for a while, and in my experience, JSON is far more practical.

This is also a good article regarding Logs as JSON: http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/12/26/log-for-m...