Blogalalia

Dave Winer recently pointed to this essay by Meg Hourihan, “What we do when we blog,” which contests the notion that blogging is exclusively a phenomenon associated with political debate or post-9/11 “war” commentary. Hourihan — one of the original folks behind Pyra, the company that brought Blogger into the world — writes thoughtfully on the subject, pointing out that the reverse-chronological structure of blogs can be, and is, a vehicle for any topic imaginable.

One line really jumped out at me:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of “page”), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

I spent years writing overnight theater reviews for the San Francisco Examiner to an exact word count (we’d agree on a number of column-inches the day before, and then I had to fill that space precisely, or write short, unless I wanted to risk having the review chopped to fit “on the flat” by a late-night copy editor’s x-acto knife). Moving to the Web in 1995, I already felt “liberated from word count” — my stories could now fill as little or as much room on the Web page as they demanded. The constraint was now not room on a piece of paper, but rather the reader’s attention span.

This is a writer’s paradise. It can also be a reader’s hell. Word count is a discipline as well as a yoke. It forces writers to make choices; deciding what to leave out is as or more important than deciding what to put in. The discipline may matter less when one is writing for an intimate few than for a mass audience, but it remains central to effective writing. When everyone is liberated from word count, who will read the ensuing torrent of verbiage?

Maybe, of course, it doesn’t matter: A blog with only a handful of readers has succeeded as long as they’re the readers the writer cares about — and who care about what the writer is saying.