We all know that Twitter has a 140 character limit for each tweet. It forces rants and diatribes into witty one liners. Not only does it make Twitter, well, Twitter, but more specifically, it increases the substance to character ratio.
Blogging on the other hand, has no pre-defined limits. Such freedom allows for a full spectrum of post lengths: from the Jason Kottke’s punctual remaindered links to the longer, magazine-style articles on A List Apart.
Setting word limits for blogging would be silly — the medium has come to rival the mainstream media in many areas. How else is The Morning News supposed to compete with The New Yorker? More realistically, limits are now unenforceable. Blogs, unlike Twitter, are a decentralized community running on a multitude of publishing platforms and content management systems.
While restricting John Gruber to maximum word counts is not going to happen, I think there is something to learn from the newspaper industry’s long-established traditional of limiting words to the physical confines of a printed page. Print media is a world measured not in bytes but in inches. And the reality of having a few inches to make a point forces writers to stick to what’s important.
Going forward, I am going to make an attempt to keep things short. Not because shorter writing is better writing (I’ll write about this at some point), but because shorter writing is better suited for the Web, RSS, and information overload. If I can say it in 140 words, I will. If I need a couple hundred, or thousand more, I will do that too. But the goal in the back of my head will be to keep it short and tasty.
I’ll leave you with Mark Twain quote that — no matter how many times it’s quoted by Zen master life-hacking productivity types — is solid advice about writing: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”