Subtraction.com

Shorter, Faster, Better

Okay, it’s true, I don’t blog enough. I used to think I was a fairly active blogger, but looking over the frequency of my posts for the past few months, it’s pretty obvious that I only manage to publish two or three times a week. And if that weren’t evident enough before now, this complaint about infrequency is the one thing that I heard loud and clear yesterday, sprinkled in amongst all the gratifyingly supportive commentary on my decision to start running ads from The Deck and Authentic Jobs on this Web site.

The problem is that, as an amateur writer, I have a particular weakness: an inability to be brief. Almost without fail, when I sit down at my computer to ‘dash off’ a post that I think will run only two or three paragraphs, I end up writing six or eight of them. What should take me ten minutes too often turns into an hour and ten minutes, and so I often can’t find the time to even start.

What I want to avoid, naturally, is the idea of quantity trumping quality — I don’t want to delude myself that readers will continue to tune into Subtraction.com just to read, for instance, that tomorrow evening I’m heading out to Austin, Texas for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where, on Sunday, I’ll be doing a power session and a panel on “High Class and Low Class and Web Design,” and that if you’re there as well, please come up and introduce yourself before Tuesday afternoon, when I fly back to New York. I mean, that’s what Twitter’s for, right?

Still, I will take the feedback to heart and try and post more often, and in doing so, I’ll do my best at striking some kind of balance between brevity, quality and quantity. Here’s an example: a post like this one would normally ramble on for another several paragraphs, but for tonight, it’s going to stop right here.

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