Less is More?

I've read Tim Stevens' blog for some time. I don't always agree with him (I don't always agree with myself), but find he often provides blogs that are thought provoking. He's gifted in an area I'm not (administration/executive pastoring), so I enjoy looking inside his brain.

Last week he had a post about a change in blogging philosophy that he's experimenting with. The post is worth reading, but in short, Tim is planning to post much longer posts with much less frequency. Rather than relying on RSS or Feedburner to drive people to his blog, he is using twitter to tweet topics when he posts in hopes that he'll drive interested readers to his blog. He's trying to post blog entries with the length of chapters in a book, in hopes that quality will trump quantity and increase his readership.

That may be how most of the world is reading blogs, but it certainly isn't how I read them. I much prefer a quick two or three paragraph blog to one that is going to take me a length of time to read. I like to expose myself to a lot of thinking, so I "follow" several blogs. I'd rather have a brief digest of what is on someone's radar than something of publishable quality. I prefer something more than a quippy tweet, but less than what I would expect to read in a book.

For me, the best blogs are the ones that make me think or challenge my thinking, but which can be read in a short amount of time. I don't like to invest a bunch of time on any one person's blog - to me the benefit of blogs is that you can get a quick glimpse into the thinking of an array of people without the same investment it would take me to read a chapter in all their books.

But, I may be the minority. What do the rest of you think?

3 comments:

Joyce said...

I agree with you, Chris. Keep it short and to the point!
Joyce

Joyce said...

I agree with you, Chris. Keep it short and to the point!

Unknown said...

When I'm reading blogs I have the attention span of a 2nd grader. If it's the length of a book chapter, introduce it in the blog with a link to a pdf of the article.