Dave Taylor on Weblogs and ADD

February 25th, 2005

I came across Dave’s blog through one of my customized RSS Feeds. His perspective on short versus long postings made for interesting reading:

“[H]ow can I keep myself swimming in the river of deep thought when all around me swirl the droplets of tactical, reactive water? I’m not averse to writing shorter entries and sharing interesting news, but I want to dip my toe into the tactical while still ensuring that everything I blog is consistent with my long-term strategic vision and thinking.

It’s just darn easy to get sucked into the flowing droplets, to spit out yet another quick two-liner instead of spending the time and effort to ensure that my weblog postings are signposts on my intellectual journey, heading in the direction I want to travel. There’s a siren song of blogging, an ease of posting lots of reactive, thought-free (or ‘thought lite’) articles, a vast ADD playground.”

“Blogging is just a tool, and RSS is just an information distribution mechanism. They’re neutral and different people approach them differently. You, dear reader, might well prefer weblogs that offer one, two, even a dozen or more 10-50 word briefs throughout the day, and more power to you.”

I included that last paragraph to point out that Taylor understands that people have different preferences on what thet want to get out of the blogging experience. In my case, I am a half long-poster and half get-to-the-point-right-away poster. It all depends on what I’m talking about. If I just want to mention a cool tool or resource, it will most likely be short. If I am in a ranting mood (which happens occasionally - yesterday being the last time), then I’ll have longer, thought out posts.

This was one point which struck a nerve for me in Gorman’s article about the Blog People. He seemed to be so against the short and sweet posts that many of us put up quickly without a thought. Why is that not allowed? The very nature of weblogs is that you can do that. The software allows us to. I’d rather shoot up a one-liner that reads, “Hey, check out this tool/resource/RSS Feed”, than have to wait and write up a long post about it (I might even forget about it and have my readers miss out on something that might make their jobs easier) later on.

Blogs work because they are flexible.

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