Hitting a wall

I have written the next installment of the story of my little trip to the hospital earlier this month, but I'm debating whether to post it. It's the fun one about what happens to one's (ok my) brain when it meets an unexpected grizzly bear in an Italian hospital learns one has cancer in a foreign country. After that, there's only really the bit where I sat up on the gurney before going into the operating room and yelled at the anaesthetist. After that, life more or less got back to normal.

People don't like big walls of text on a blog. Like the Barbarian Hordes of old, they see a big wall of text and turn away on their short shaggy horses, saying, "Bag this. Let's go check out the latest funny list on Cracked.com".

I recently was on a conference call for LSN and the issue of long articles was brought up. There is some Clever Person who has pointed out that on average, people only read about the first 400 words of an article on the internet. And that's generous. My argument is that this is totally immaterial. No news service that does online news bothers its head about this rule. Even the egregiously populist outfits like the Daily Mail still do 1200 word articles as a regular thing. I said that this is a rule we just have to ignore.

(In fact, it's not a new internet thing at all. The old print papers knew that people only read the headline most of the time, and in rare cases, about the first two paragraphs of which ever article they're interested in. That's why they invented the "inverted pyramid" style that everyone who goes to J-School learns on their first day. It's where you put the first three most important things in the first paragraph, with the most sensationalist thing in the first sentence. Yes, it's true; journalism is totally focused on emotional manipulation of the readers.)

My big rule for blogging is simple: "Post short; post often." Other rules include, "Never reveal what's really going on in your life," and "Always be funny, even especially if its about death and mayhem."

Lately I've been breaking that rule by posting infrequently and putting up long things about my personal life, most of which aren't funny.

I also type too fast. The last time I bothered to clock myself, I came in at 85 words a minute when I'm typing straight out of my head. This means that I can get down nearly everything I'm thinking about, which isn't always a good thing.

So, I don't know, what do you think?

Actually, never mind. I don't care what you think. But I'll let you know that there are only a couple more of the long tedious posts about the hospital visit left to go, so suck it up.



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