goat-choker (n.) An article of inordinate and suffocating length, produced to gratify the vanity of the author and the aspirations of the publication. (John McIntyre)
I regularly write articles that, by Web standards, are obscenely long. My November article on ShopWell was 6,500 words long, and my series last week on Google’s mobile ambitions ran to almost 7,000 words. Granted, it was broken up into three parts, but the longest section was still 2,600 words, or five Xconomy pages. Which is about five times the length of your average piece in TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, and the other popular tech blogs.
I wrote 7,000 words about Google because that’s how much space the material demanded. But sometimes I feel like a hypocrite, because the truth is that I don’t like to read long posts on the Web. If I come across an important article that’s more than two pages long (about 1,000 words), I click my browser’s Read Later button. That sends the piece off to Instapaper, a free Web service that reformats text for easy reading on an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Kindle e-reader.
For me, Instapaper is a real lifesaver. I love curling up with my iPad or Kindle and reading for hours. An article might look like a goat-choker on a Web page—but when it’s shorn of all the distractions of the desktop and the Web and presented on one of Instapaper’s nice, white, folio-style pages, it becomes easily digestible.
But that begs the question: why am I still writing long pieces for the Web? I don’t have the excuse that I used to have, when I worked for magazines like Science and Technology Review—i.e., that my pieces were just the digital reflections of works originally prepared for print.
I guess I’m going on faith. The faith that at least a few readers will be interested enough to click “next page” all the way to the end of a five-page article. Our data shows that there are such people, though not as many as I’d really like. The glass-half-full view is that at least some of my readers are fanatically loyal, sticking with me all the way to the end. The Google article is pretty heavy going, and it seems ungrateful to wish that more people were this attentive.
Then there’s the glass-half-empty view—the one that says it’s futile to make such high demands on readers when there’s such a big supply of short, snackable content just a click or two away. A print magazine on a newsstand might be competing with a few hundred other magazines, at worst, for the prospective buyer’s attention. Blogs must contend with the entire Web, where there are well over a trillion unique URLs, and where short-form content rules. (There’s a reason the average YouTube video is under three minutes long.) On top of all that, I can verify from my own experience that—as The New York Review of Books put it in a 2009 essay—“readers themselves seem allergic to reading extended pieces on computer screens.”
So we have a huge point of friction: The Web is the most flexible, immediate, and pervasive medium ever invented for spreading the written word. By extension, it ought to be a great medium for long-form writing. Yet it’s often a headache, literally, to consume those words on the screen of a personal computer. So people don’t.
Maybe what’s needed to reduce the friction and rejuvenate long-form journalism online is a more flexible way to send written information across the last one or two feet—or, as Web geeks might put it, a way to decouple the network layer from the presentation layer. I’m encouraged here by news that Dave Winer, the RSS and podcasting pioneer, is working on
