So over the last few days I’ve been reading other peoples blogs. There are millions, and the topics are diverse to say the least. You can read about any topic and any kind of interesting facts. There are a huge amount of top tens, there’s even some top elevens. These are geared towards the people who like to read in bite sized chunks. That got me thinking.
Just how long do you have to catch someone’s attention on the Internet? There are some sketchy articles on this subject hanging about the web, but no real study has been done in recent months. When you think about it we all like bite sized info, think of what probably is the best of these; Twitter. 140 characters, and most people don’t go over that much and those that do begin by apologising for having to use two tweets to get their message across. So if our attention span is dropping where does that leave the honest blogger? Does this mean we all have to blog in bullet point form, getting our message over quickly?
Well yes and no, I know that’s a little oblique but there are people out there who actually read an entire post if it’s good enough. To put this to the test I started to time myself. Using a stopwatch and Stumbleupon I started to work out how long my own span was going to be. I chose Stumbleupon because it is truly random, there was no chance of me picking something I like. In that way there was no way I could upset the test. So what happened? Well I stumbled hundreds of sites and spent no time on any of them. In fact I spent on average 3.2 seconds looking at things that didn’t interest me, and 9.4 seconds looking at web sites that caught me eye, but more interestingly I spent up to 5 minutes reading good blogs. The thing I found with the blogs, or rather what kept me on the site was a good title, the more obscure or the lack of a title and I was very quick to stumble on.
What have I learned from this? Well my attention span is very short, but more importantly the Internet is really full of crap. Most of the web sites I looked at were nonsense, but there are some good and genuine bloggers out there. I also found out that you have 3.2 seconds or so to get someone attention, so that’s why I’ve called this post sex on a deserted island, I hope I got your attention?
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