Go ahead, click.
Having given the most obvious title for this page to a previous page, three years
ago, I found myself arguing with myself over whether I could once again give that
title to this new page. I decided against it, but a click will bring the inquisitive
reader to that previous page, and to a snippet of a favorite piece of music from
years ago - it's worth it.
But moving effortlessly from the almost distant past to the very here and now,
the question of the proper length of a blog post is one that's in rather constant
flux. A few months back I referred to
Twitter, a tool which I was quite convinced would
never become mainstream. It seems, however, that this is yet another example of
guessing wrong. Twitter messages are confined to 140 characters at the most -
seemingly hardly long enough to become a blog post. But, as Michael Pick explains
to us in his quite
comprehensive overview of Twitter, that restriction has brought about a rise
in what's called microblogging. The term has actually been around for quite a
while, as one reference from
December, 2006 suggests:
During the past few months, I’ve been observing some
changes in the blogging behaviors of many of my friends. I’ve been referring
to their behavior as microblogging. I thought I was onto something new but a
quick Live
search reveals that the term has been floating around for awhile (just when
I thought I had invented a new term!). I couldn’t find anything that actually
defined it, though, so I figured I’d give my notion of what it means, what I’ve
been observing, and why it’s important.
There's certainly nothing wrong with brevity. I don't know whether the story is
true or not, but Ernest Hemingway is said to have claimed that a six word story
of his was the best he'd written. Numerous
competitions have been held to keep up that tradition. If blog posts continue
moving in this direction, I guess that one benefit will be that nobody will claim
that Boidem columns are like blogs.
Go to: I'm dreaming of a short blog post, or
Go to: In one tenth the time