Corporate Governance

Longer Posts, Twitter, and an Evolving Blogosphere

By J Robert Brown Jr.

The Blogosphere has long been a state of nature, with few barriers to entry and few guarantees of quality.  Twitter came along and in some respects made the Blogosphere look dated.  Those with things to say preferred tweets to posts.

But, in fact, as a column in Wired Magazine (The Short and the Long of It, Clive Thompson) discusses, the presence of tweets and other short form methods of communication have caused evolution in the Blogosphere and, to some degree, resulted in greater order to the blogging process. 

The column notes that there remains a craving for more in depth and detailed analysis.  Traditionally, this type of analysis occurred in the hard copy media.  Increasingly, however, it has moved to the Blogosphere. See Jan. 2011 Issue at 40 ("It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take.  But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning blog essays . . . ").

The result has been a shift in blogging.  As the piece notes:

• Ten years ago, my favorite bloggers wrote middle takes -- a link with acouple of setnences of commentary --  and they'd update a few times a day.  Once Twitter arrived, they began blogging less often but with much longer, more-in-depth essays.

Apparently this view is reflected in the reading tasts of blog post devotees.  Id. ("One survey found that the most poopular blog posts today are the longer ones, 1,600 words on average.").

Certainly, this approach has been the staple of The Race to the Bottom.  When the Blog began back in 2007, the common advise was to write very short posts.  It wasn't all about attention span.  Technology played a role.  Search engine indexing, so the story went, only looked at the title and the first few sentences of a post. 

From the beginning, however, The Race to the Bottom stressed analysis and longer posts (or series of posts) rather than speed, the attribute of many other blogs.  In addition, this Blog sought to post, often in the form of pleadings and other litigation documents, the primary materials that were discussed in the post (they are invariably on the companion web cite, The DU Corporate Governance Site), allowing readers to take the analysis even further.

Short statements for Twitter; in depth analysis to the Blogosphere.  The Race to the Bottom is where it belongs.   

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on December 20, 2010 (boomark / email).