Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter

Perhaps the same effect could be achieved by 50 minutes worth of idea repetition over the course of 10 days. I'll come back tomorrow and post that concept again with different wording.

Don't listen to them. Blogs are tools to publish stuff. You choose in what form you will publish stuff (cute pictures, one sentence, one paragraph, or long essays).

As an example, I would be glad if Paul Graham used "standard" blogging tools to publish his essays. At least we would have an reliable RSS feed (as opposed to the manually-maintained RSS feeds that are available for his essays).

I talked in a blog entry a few days ago about Poe's theory that a short story should be readable in one sitting, and actually referenced your Java article. Poe says:

>If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression- for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.

This probably explains why, ten seconds after reading boing-boing, I can't remember anything, but am left with a general sense that copyright is bad, somehow...

I think the complexity of the subject, plus the ability to illustrate with examples, also mean that longer pieces last. It's a formula that worked for Joel, until he started posting travel and wallpapering tips, rather than considered pieces on software development.

Lastly, you inspired me to go try ruby after your recent code-size post. And now it's burying itself in my brain.

yegge.send { |me| me.thanks }

You're blogging for a purpose--to improve "scholarship" (or what passes for it) about our world. To that end, make your posts as long as you'd like.

I came across your blog a few months back (in fact it may have been an ancestor to this blog...) when I was looking for some joyful emacs hacks.

The length is acceptable. Long enough to read while waiting for a script to run across a few dozen computer for example, but short enough that you didn't feel you just stole time from work. (and of course since I used python and emacs in work I was at least gaining some applicable knowledge from the articles[?] I read :-) )

TL;DR.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

I'd posit a different theory - when you've got interesting things to say, people don't mind length. You usually do - yeah, yeah, everybody else at your workplace is smarter, sure - and that's when it sticks.

Since "interesting" is different for different people, there'll always be somebody who doesn't like it. But since you only write once a month, and the essay usually is meaningful, we all come back for another helping.

(This month, I'm in the complainer fraction - but I'll still be back. I'd ask you to write about different things, but I'd suspect it's completely useless ;)

I like your blog entries. They are lengthy, interesting, and thought provoking. It conveys a personal feel. In fact, I feel like I am listening to a conversation (with the entries and the comments). It feels humane.
I am however, guilty of not reading every word of it. I do eyeball scans to pick up keywords that interest me, and your entry has a lot of them.
After reading your current entry, I realized that of all the feeds I am subscribed to, I pay more attention to the articles and essay-styled entries blog than those short technical snipplets or stuff on 'my cat is cute!'.
If I want those stuff, I would be on their twitter feed.
I am trying to move my style towards essay and articles now on my own blog, and removing short entries to create a greater depth to my blog.
Hang in there, and keep the entries long. :)

For me an important metric for post length is interruptibility. I was interrupted twice while reading your post. If a essay is mildly interesting and I get pulled away onto something else this usually means the article gets axed.

With your post the headings gave me logical pause points and made it easy to jump back in. When I read long posts the formatting only second to the content with overall length coming in third

Why should you care what impolite and lazy people think? It is your blog, write about what you like, and have some fun while doing it. Sure, your audience is larger than most bloggers, but that doesn't mean you should become a public pawn.

I would love to be able to write lengthy posts, just like you. In fact, I am jealous of writers, like you, who can dump their mind on paper with your ease.

Heck, if the only common critic, you get, is that your writings are long. You're doing hell of a good job.

Not to jump on "Good job, Steve, keep it up" bandwagon, but I don't mind the length of your blog posts. Hell, I went through your Amazon collection of blogs in a week. Read pretty much all of them, and more importantly every word of each post. It was inspiring and humbling at the same time.

To spend 20-50 minutes once a month reading a post that will make a difference in how I view software development in general is actually a good investment of my time, not bad (See how I wove the idea of this "essay" in?)

That's enough worship at the altar of Steve Yegge for now. Keep it up.

Funny, I don't have small blogs on my feeds. Or, rather, they don't get read. It just feels to me that if something doesn't take a few minutes to read, it isn't worth reading it.

Unless, of course, it's news. So I subscribe to slashdot rss, and I do scan it now and then. But you, Paul, Joel, Cringely and others, you people I read start to finish, 100% of the time, even if I find the eventual post tedious.

Commenter "groby" was right: people tolerate article length because you're interesting. And possibly controversial, or any number of the attributes that create interest. But your cache-busting theory seems like a rationalization to justify how much of my brain you feel you should occupy.

A related link-
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html#brooks

I read this one in 2 minutes but somehow it still remains in my head. Possibly because my memory manager is quite capable of handling its own swapping? ;)

Steve, your theory is amusing and it seems consistent with my personal experience (of reading your posts). I stumbled upon your blog a few weeks ago and found it to be excellent - I'm probably about half way through its entirety.

I've read "you should blog" posts by several people with opinions I respect, but yours was the one that actually pushed me into doing it. None of the others had the significant impact on me that You Should Write Blogs did and the length of the essay shares much of the blame I believe - you simply made more of an argument

It's very strange that nobody so far mentioned bathroom breaks as a measure for essay length. Yours fit perfectly!

ooo.... meta...

People who are too lazy to read your long blog posts don't deserve the wisdom you're trying to impart.

I think the reason people complain about the length is because they're a bit like me. I generally have my rss reader on during the day and periodically check to see if there's anything new.

If there's a new stevey rant though my whole day's blog reading is occupied. I'm too busy to just sit around and do nothing for half an hour so instead I read things in small increments when I'm waiting on something. When there's a new stevey rant it takes me pretty much the whole day to get through it so everything else got pushed back.

Still, please don't change anything. There's a reason why everything gets pushed back when you post something new!

only interesting blogs dares to be long...................

Heck, some don't even read at all. It's one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They can't read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them commenting all the time in my blogs: "I didn't actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same..." Lovely.

And they have a name: slashdotters

You've hit the nail on the head as to why your blog is unique, I think. I heard of someone condensing your posts somewhere, for quick reading by the Digg crowd, and thought: oh, for heaven's sake. Like what the world needs is the Fox News version of Stevey's Blog Rants.

I would say, though, that your goal (of drawing people into much longer posts than expectations would allow) does influence your style. Your opening paragraphs are sometimes a bit glib and exclaimed. But that's just you gradually leading people along the path between the medium as they expect it and your content as you want them to be receive it. You need to ease the passage a bit or every bugger will turn off.

I wouldn't want every blog I read to be as verbal as yours. But if I look back at the books that have affected me the most, the ones that still stand out are those where, like you say, reading was punctuated by going for a wander every twenty or thirty minutes to frown at the kettle or watch a cheeky blackbird turn over moss in the garden. Consuming those books, I felt like I was digesting what I was ingesting, as opposed to letting it all pass through me like literary Olestra.

I just want to know if your cat is cute.

Stevey, I am just glad that you will continue to post big.

I don't know why these loud mouthed whiners complain all the time. It is not like they are *forced* to read or anything. Even if you switch to Twitter, these cry babies will complain about something else. [Ooh you type "I have" instead of "I've" or something...]

I love your posts, just the way they are.

Thanks!

~tl;r

I would like to mention: longness may be necessary for popularity, but it is not sufficient.

My only problem with your long-ass essays is that I don't know how much longer they have to go - because of all the comments at the bottom of the page I can't use the thumb of the scroll bar as an indicator.

It's a bit like sitting through the pain of a powerpoint presentation that doesn't indicate what page your on, and of how many.

So when I get about 2/3rds of the way through an article I'm thinking 'oh god, please end soon, I have to eat.' This is kind of the effect you are after, but maybe people might not give up if you numbered your headings in descending order, or something?

I'm no cog scientist, but I think there are some cog sci ideas related to your pet theory. First, the "medium-term memory":
http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php?title=Medium_Term_Memory

Second, the notion of a "triune brain". The idea (IIRC) is that short intense bursts of data tend to stimulate the reflexive (and unreflective) "reptilian" part, while the neocortex responds to more extended stimuli. The reptilian part needs constant stimulation (MTV, anyone?) while the neocortex does not. For long term happiness, go neocortex!
http://www.psycheducation.org/emotion/triune%20brain.htm

(But I could have this totally wrong -- take a look at the links.)

In any case, I like your posts because they're both long and interesting. You've gotten me to look into Haskell, but not (yet) to take another trip through JavaScript.

I read your essay/post. I did not read the comments so far. I just wanted to say the length of the essay certainly helps one remember having read it because it requires a bigger investment on the part of the reader. However, I believe the value of the content has more to do with whether people commit the ideas to persistent memory. I believe this is so, because if you didn't have any good ideas and your posts were just long... you guessed, I wouldn't read them. On the other hand my mind often tosses around the content of good posts that were significantly shorter than yours. Jeff Atwood accomplishes this well. So, I would add that size does matter, but content still matters, and may matter more.

Certainly agree with you Stevey. Atleast one benefit is we get to remember or atleast recollect essays easily as they would have been written to address a specific topic. Case in point, your essay on bad resumes about 5/6 blogs back!

Just to add one data point here: I've seen this same thing at work in political blogging. In the year or two following 9/11, two of the most influential political bloggers were also two of the most verbose: Steven Den Beste and Bill Whittle. Everyone complained about the length of their posts (and in fact, one detractor started a recurring "shorter Steven Den Beste" feature, the equivalent of a "Java sucks" summary). Yet the memes they promoted were everywhere in the (political) blogosphere; even people who stridently disagreed with them at least were familiar with their arguments.

Please don't forget non-native speakers (readers?) in your best-blog-entry-length-estimation. Oh, and avoid familiar terms when you make important points.

But I think your theory is not right, in the sense that length is a side effect of what makes the true value of an essay: argumentation. If you simply state that our brains are like computers and have multiple levels of cache, most people will think you're just another lunatic. By taking the time to make an introduction, elaborate, and conclude as you do, people can understand your statement.
I don't know if it exists in the US, but that's exactly what we are trained to do here in college. Students are asked to write a short essay, about 4-pages long, discussing a topic chosen by the teacher. But the ideas you express in these 4 pages do not really matter. What the teacher evaluates is the structure of your work, how well is built your thesis. I've written countless of these 'dissertations' as homework or in 2-hours exams. And it has a significative impact on how I write my own pseudo-blog entries.

Keep 'em long Steve and it's good to know you were at NNPS.

Ironically, this was (or felt) shorter than your usual blog length :-)

This feels much like a Catch-22. I can't say that your blog entries are too long because I read them - therefore they are by definition not too long for me to read. I bet you hardly ever get people telling you "I don't read you blog because the entries are huge", but you mostly get people saying "I read your blog, but it's too long".

I'll skip commenting on the theory, as my comments would only be based on instinct, as the theory itself is. I'd like to comment on why I think people complain about the length. It's not because it's too long to read or absorb, or anything like that. It's because it's too long to fit into one's hectic, busy, time-poor day. I read two-paragraph blogs while waiting for my computer to finish something, or for a colleague to finish a phone-call. I can't do that with yours. I have to wait for that quiet day when I'm not too busy and I can spend an afternoon reading 4 of your blog entries from a few months ago. Or worse still, read on entry in multiple sitting because of interruptions.

But that's fine by you. You're happy for your essays to be read after months or years as long as you know they have an impact and reach a lot of people. So that's the right length for you. The length is merely a higher barrier to entry: if the entries were average in quality, people wouldn't bother reading them. Yours just happen to be quite good and therefore get read *despite* being quite long, but end up having a bigger impact and reach and popularity *because* they're quite long.

Great blog, Stevey. Keep writing and don't change the size (despite what follows :-).

I've found that there are three kinds of blog entries of yours - type a : which I can't stop reading (good agile, bad agile, the resume tips, the code size thingy), type b: stuff that I can read, but I have to make myself read it. I keep telling myself - this guy usually has some interesting ideas, lets keep going (this entry for instance). And type c: stuff I just give up on (the vague story about the indian couple somehow related to static typing).

And based on that I'm going to propose a simpler explanation. People read well written stuff that has interesting ideas. So the quality of a blog entry is roughly proportional to two things - how much insight the reader gains and secondly how well expressed the ideas are. I postulate that your quality varies, sometimes brilliant and sometimes slightly below average. And the length of your entries is uniformly distributed across these varying levels of quality. So, when you write some thing boring after a few brilliant essays people wrongly attribute this to the length.

I had almost finished reading your essay, when I suddenly realised I was asleep.
(That was just the painkillers kicking in though.)

I am glad I'm not the only one who writes long posts! (found this on reddit).

When I was visited general psychology lectures at Novosibirsk State University, I did hear about operative memory in humans. This was a kind of memory that keeps info about current activities. Longevity is about several weeks/months (after last refresh cycle).

There was also notion of "recent operative memory". The info in recent operative memory is under transition to operative memory. The duration of full transition is about 15 minutes (partial transitions are possible). Info in it gets forgotten if the person looses consciousness in a traumatic way (headstrike or sudden sleep). Loosing memory due to interruption possibly because of this one.

So split was:
1. Short memory (under minute). Similar to 1st level CPU cache
2. Recent operative memory (under half of hour). Similar to 2nd level cache.
2. Operative memory (under half of year). Similar to RAM.
3. Long term memory (almost unlimited but subject to wetware failures). Similar to HDD.

For example, operative memory keeps info that is almost hopelessly forgotten right after passing exams by students. It also keeps info about code that one is developing. So if you are looking at the code and are trying to figure out what you wanted to write, it means that info has left operative memory hopefully into long term one.

However, we used some Russian textbooks on the topic. So I'm not able to provide you with quotes.

I was thinking that the length of your posts were accidental - a side effect of the way you compose the prose. I'll read it as long as its interesting.

Another point, which I think is important is that a blog is read on-screen. So, the length should be short enough to be read on screen. I mean, I can not read a novel, however interesting, on screen.

I would say it's not about the length. It's about the quality. If you write a long post full of crap, unstructured and with no novel or interesting ideas people will stop reading. If you are a good writer you'll manage to get people to read you, even if you write smaller posts. What's true is that if you try to imprint an idea, you can't explain all the facts and the mental process in just a few lines. That's why, imho, long posts by GOOD writers make a difference :)

Btw, great post! :)

The key is that you use semicolons. Lots of them. Encountering them short circuits the reader's mind and makes it pliable, susceptible to the entry of foreign ideas. These ideas then enter the physical brain itself and hide, lurking behind one or another of those soft warm and unsuspecting clumps of neurons that fill our normally quiet inner cavities. Then later, when it's time to molt, they pop out unexpectedly and party like crazy, and no one knows where they got all the goofy thoughts. It's true! Your writing contains tiny viruses! (Or is it really viri? Who can say?) Heh. -- Dave

"As a computer, even though it's structually different from a von Neumann machine, it's still constrained by the same laws of physics. Hence, it probably has a multi-level cache."

This doesn't follow. Please elaborate.

Let me suggest a cache replacement strategy: LRI, as in least-relevant information. LRI would explain the usual inability to remember the most recent part of a conversation (less context, and therefore seemingly less relevant). It also would explain some of the seeming randomness in the things that people take away from a particular essay.

That would suggest that to ensure each reader has the same take-away, you have to build a context that will always make the intended take-away relevant, probably my completely replacing the initial cache contents. That's probably not possible, but it's interesting to think about what it would take.

(I also enjoy your lengthy posts, and appreciate your contribution to the common body of knowledge.)

Turning off comments now that the spammers have started rolling in. (Spam deleted.)

I suspect I'll probably be leaving comments on for each new entry for about 1-2 weeks after I write it, then turning them off.

Thanks for all your support in the comments! Very encouraging.