“Should Blogs Be Short?” or

“Scheduled Blogging Is Hard For Practicing Lawyers”

The latter is probably the most insightful thing I learned about social media and blogging over this past week. That’s right, I have been quiet this week. Not because I haven’t had a lot that I wanted to blog about but because I have been busy as all get out on my “day job”. Sorry. There’s one other thing.

Which is the better title for this blog post? Or is it, …

I have always known that I can be a bit long-winded. Ok, a lot long-winded. This was never a problem when writing law review articles because the editors always seemed to like something with a little “heft” to it. But what about for blogging? Probably not. So as I have been reading other blogs I decided to focus a little less on the substance of what was being written and more on the length of the blog posts. Wanna guess what I noticed?

If you guessed that long-winded may be fine for writing law review articles but not for blogging, you got it! That is, I have noticed that in looking at some of the big-bosses of blogging’s blogs, they are short, sweet and direct. They usually offer little fluff and get straight to the point. Something tells me these big-bosses know what they’re doing. The question is why?

Perhaps it could be because many bloggers are like me and have real “day jobs” and do not need to be spending hours drafting each blog post so they have to keep them short and sweet. This will be my goal in the future. I promise, and not just for the benefit of you the reader, but for me to have a better shot of getting regular blog posts out on a routine schedule.

More importantly, however, I think it is because of the attention span of most social media users. Not too long ago I read an article called Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, and the gist of the article was about the decreasing attention spans among kids who frequently used the computers and the Internet. I do not think this is limited to just children, however.

Check this out! Your Audience Doesn’t Read. That’s Why You Have to Do This

Based upon my own blog browsing patterns, I notice myself also having a pretty short attention span when I read blogs, and I generally like reading in-depth “deep” types of materials — but not when I’m reading blogs. When I’m reading blogs, it’s usually for information — I want the information and I want it as quickly as possible. Perhaps that is why. Maybe there are other reasons.

I don’t know … but instead of wasting more cyber-ink hypothecating on the many reasons why this may or may not be the case (and increasing the length of this post), I will simply ask you to tell me your thoughts in the comments below. What do you think, should blogs (generally) be long or short?
Why?

Note: After writing this off the top of my head (i.e., stream of consciousness) yesterday, I came in this morning and read an excellent post by one of my favorite bloggers, NittyGriddy, entitled How Long Is Too Long? This post has a heck of a lot more research, data, and style than my post and generally concludes that it’s not the length that matters, but the value of what you put into it. And I agree with that. So, if this topic is of interest to you, go read it — NOW!