Why my posts will be shorter and more frequent from now on

Apart from my big essay-style posts, I'm blogging a lot less than I used to. And it's something I'm seeing in many others. It's not just that other shorter form social networking places have dragged me away, but it's also the time it takes to draft a long blog post. I just don't have so much time for it at the moment. I've seen some people leave altogether and use systems like Posterous and Friendfeed instead (Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are examples). Blogging is getting a run for its money.

But recently two things have been pushing me back here towards my blog: ownership of content, and post length.

First the ownership. The fact is that all this content I'm ploughing into Twitter and Facebook is like water down the drain. You don't own your content and when you try to find it one day in the future, you'll struggle. I've tried. So because of that, I'll be posting here a bit more often.

Second, the post length. I find it a bit too much sometimes to put a whole blog post together when I can summarise in 140 characters on Twitter. But stating the obvious, 140 characters isn't often enough space to say what you want to.

So I'm going to be using a different posting style to balance the less frequent essays with more frequent observations. Shorter and quicker, probably written more often on my mobile (like this is now).

So forgive the lack of links, images, video inside my posts. They're staying elsewhere. And this will probably be one of the longer ones for a while.

Comments

[Aaron Uhrmacher]

Great to hear, Drew! I agree that the nature of blog posts might change to accommodate our shortened attention spans, but I rather read your analysis and thoughts here than try and guess them from 140 chars. Cheers.

PS - Thank you for not just going the Posterous route!

[Danny Whatmough]

I've been finding similar issues recently. I still think there is a place for blogging - for longer form discussion and analysis, but agree that blog posts don't need to be thousand word essays. In fact, the best often aren't (take Mr Godin for example...)