short or long?

Shel Israel, writer of Naked Conversations (one of the books that we are reading/discussing in class), is currently the writer of a blog called Global Neighbourhoods.

On March 12, 2007, Shel blogged a post entitled Blogging: Short v. Long. The article was in regards to the length of a recent blog post. Shel recently made a post giving an overview of his new book than included five sections, bringing the total word count to about 3,750. Readers have been complaining about the length, stating that "people are too busy now, to read all those words."

Basically, people are saying that two years ago when Shel wrote Naked Conversations, it was the norm to write really long blog posts, but now the novelty has worn off and short posts are the way to go.

Though Shel acknowledges this argument, in the end he writes that though some people may not like his long blogs, he will continue to do them because blogging has helped improve his books. Though it may hurt his "Technorati ranking", his goal of writing a great book is more important than improving his ranking.

I thought this post was really interesting for several reasons. First, we are reading Naked Conversations for class, so it is of course interesting to read a blog by the author. Next, I thought the issue of short versus long blogs is incredibly relevant to our class. I have noticed that when I check my bloglines subscriptions every day, I rarely read the incredibly long posts. Unless the title really interests me, I usually just skip over the blog posts that are ridiculously long. However, I also feel like there are several blogs that regularly post really short posts as well and sometimes I feel like those are almost pointless. I enjoy reading blogs that I can read in just a couple minutes. I get the point, learn something, but didn't have to spend 20 minutes reading.

I hope, however, that this blogging style works out for Shel. If his primary reason for blogging is to gain insight and criticism, then he should definitely continue to blog as long as he wants. It seems as if people are still reading his blog, so the small minority who want to complain can just continue to do so, and the others can continue to read tons about Global Neighbourhoods.