Too Long, Didn’t Read

January 26th, 2008

I’ve been tossing back and forth about the nature and length of blog posts recently, and while I was going to give the entire topic a pass and go on happily typing a few recent events have made me decide to actually talk about it. The first of which was a discussion among coworkers regarding an article called: "Write Articles, Not Blog Postings". The second was a very good opinion piece on the topic by another coworker, taking the topic to the next step and discussing the blog as a delivery platform. The third was my own struggle to even complete a post (you wouldn’t believe how many unfinished drafts I have) and the last one was a recent list exchange that resulted in tl;dr’s from a few friends whose opinion would have been extremely pertinent (and in at least one case particularly desired).

The question I’m trying to answer is “How long should my posts be”, and the classic answer to that is “it depends”. There’s the question of topic, the question of depth, the question of time that I have in my day and the question of rigor. All of these fall together into something better described by a state diagram than a simple post, and everyone ends up with their own particular preference.

To me, fundamentally, the issue is about my audience, and what my audience expects,. This can vary greatly- my professional blog for instance is targeted at developers who are more interested in libraries and code documentation than shiny effects, while my personal blog is targeted at giving my community of friends updates on my thoughts and life. But even so I really have no control over who chooses to read, and in the world of community-forged brands and individual customizability it’s much easier to alienate a reader than it is to recruit one. If I post something someone doesn’t like, the ability to remove me from their RSS feed is just one mouse click away, but to find a new friend or professional reader they have to be aware of me in the first place, which is no small feat.

As much as I’d like to think I do, I have very little choice over who actually constitutes my audience. I can guide it in some ways: Promote the blogs in certain areas, structure my topics and content in particular ways, but without any kind of quantifiable feedback there’s no way for me to tell whether I’m getting any traction with the people I’m targeting. A great example of what I mean by this is some of the early online forum communities in around the dot-com bubble: A company or brand would open create the opportunity hoping (vainly) their customers would find it, and in one particular case a ladies fashion brand was entirely overtaken by a community of transvestites (I wish I remembered the details on this).

Now, for my professional blog at Practical Flash I can definitely talk about my own preferences, so that’s reasonably easy. Short, to the point, step-by-step instruction and the ability to skip between them for the particular item I’m looking for (now that I think of it, I don’t do that yet). My audience will understand highly technical talk and non-flash-developers will get lost, so there’s a decent amount of selectivity built into the topic. This blog however is a little more difficult. I have my old friends community at Livejournal reading it, a link from our internal intranet, soon-to-be a reference from the Columbus Adobe Users Group and who knows how many online communities, dating profiles and defunct online résumés with the information right there for the taking. That’s not counting family either; my dad’s a famous academic, and my sisters are extremely accomplished in their own rights- lo, the curse of a unique last name. Anyway, in short my audience includes old friends, coworkers with whom I have both friendly and professional relationships and past and future business contacts… and all that again for each member of my family.

The constraints this puts on my posts is significant: I can’t talk about anything work related, can’t engage in casual griping, I can’t say anything that might reflect badly on my or my siblings’ career (politics and social commentary goes right out the window), and have to keep everything bite-sized enough that I don’t alienate friends who’ve grown so used to my opinions that they just skip long posts, all the while balancing that against my natural tendency to be verbose, chatty, and fill my content with incidental parentheticals (how else to communicate subtext!).

So what do I write about? Well, apparently I write long articles about how I don’t know what to write about. How’s that for irony .

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