Matt, an Australia based Interaction designer, left a comment on an earlier swissmiss post and that’s how I discovered his blog A Considered Approach. What caught my attention was his site feature that lets you filter his articles by length.
This has me wondering: Is this just a sad sign of our times? Or is it just a very clever way of engaging a visitor to read more posts? And then I was chuckling… Given how incredibly short and visual most of my posts are, this filtering mechanism would have to be broken down into seconds for swissmiss.
That’s very neat. Is he using a plugin?
Aug 27th, 2010 / 5:26 pm
@annand it is a simple wordpress category
Aug 27th, 2010 / 5:37 pm
I think this is equally clever and useless:)
I could imagine it being useful on newssites, thst could offer you a 1-minute version of an article or a long-version.
What I had to think of instantly was the average reading time generator we created one afternoon:
http://stijlroyal.de/art
Aug 28th, 2010 / 6:04 am
Maybe it’s an odd self assessment on his part.
Do we really spend less time on a wordless post? I look at your posts longer than most sites with writing. A picture’s worth a thousand words…
It’s a cliché but it’s pithy – when something is visually stimulating I linger over it. Far too many bloggers don’t trust their audience, so there’s no intelligence in what they show. I can’t help but think this means they know at least subconsciously how dull their writing is.
That said, I think longer posts can work if there is attention to breaking up the page. Most people are reading at work (we were pretty surprised as the evidence for this showed up in our stats) and they want refreshment with their browsing, no matter what the topic.
Aug 28th, 2010 / 9:56 am