As a Twitter voyeur and back room social network peeping Tom, I notice lots of little trends. One such trend is this idea of blogging brevity, concision, short to-the-point articles and so forth. Is this concise blogging or blogging laziness . . . I suspect a little of both.
Some bloggers are adamant about short, precise posts–getting rid of all extraneous adjectives and adverbs–distilling everything into a neat, quickly read package. But why? I agree, some types of articles should be short and succinct. Some bloggers come to a lengthy post and immediately leave saying, “What an idiot. I don’t have time to read more than 500 words. Hasn’t this writer heard of lean writing?”
Are you one of those if it takes me more than 30 seconds to read I’m off to the next blog bloggers? If you can’t read a lengthy article, you would never make it through an entire book. You’re might not a blogger. You might be a frogger hopping from site to site with the attention span of a reptile (with a full belly).
Are you so concerned about getting to your daily read numbers or EC credits that you would skip reading a great post due to length? If you aren’t willing to actually read and savor some of the great writing out there, perhaps you are just plain lazy. Maybe you’re in blogging for a different reason than I am. Some people have 20,000 sites in their RSS reader and scan them all (I don’t use RSS, I actually go to the actual site to read). And that’s the thing: they don’t read . . . they gloss over and scan.
When I read someone’s article, I take my time and really read it (sometimes 2-3 times if it’s really good). It prevents me from being able to read a million blogs, but I feel like they worked hard on it so it deserves some real attention–especially if they are my friend.
Another Rant
I know one blogger (who shall remain nameless because I will not add to his incoming links) who is known as a social network maven with over 25,000 Twitter followers. The other day, he published an article about commenting–not an even remotely informative, fresh, new, insightful or well written one–but a decent plagiarized article. I’d say below average, written on a high school level and devoid of all originality. Yes I am brutally honest and impeccably accurate.
The post got almost 200 comments from 200 different people in just a few hours–not just one commentator leaving most of them as on some sites. The author replied to only two comments. OK . . . a below average article (by any standard) about rehashed antiquated has-been information getting that much support? How is that possible?
The comments were like:
“This article changed my life. I am astonished. You are a genius.”
or
“You’ve done it again. This is why you are a networking god. You are the best and I only hope to be 1/32 as knowledgeable as you one day.”
Just endless ass kissing and ridiculous schmoozing. I was LMAO.
Many bloggers believe that by kissing the asses of the “big dogs”, somehow their popularity will rub off on them. Sheep make the money world go around.
I would be freaking embarrassed to tell someone how great they are just to score brownie points. This is why I generally never read marketing, SEO, and make money on line blogs (maybe a few). Their audiences make me wanna puke. If I had that kind of popularity and got that many brown-nosing comments I would reply to each one individually and say, “Get a life.”
Seriously.
Now there’s some blogging brevity for you.
Stuff that in your blog taco and eat it . . . I feel all better now.
