Blog Posts Are The Ideal Form of the Written Word

Of all the things I read, I find blog posts to be the most enjoyable format.

Occasionally I will read a book that is memorable or even, in rare circumstances, life-altering. Those are usually the ones that manage to fully cover what they set out to discuss, without overstaying their welcome. A lot of books I read have “this could have been an email” energy, where it’s clear that the author had about thirty pages worth of ideas to discuss, but instead they will repeat themselves and pad it all out to fill the length requirements needed to get their books onto store shelves.

I can’t remember where I heard it, but around the time the iTunes store launched and you could purchase songs a-la carte for the first time, someone made the point that the song was the natural form for music. Now, instead of having to buy a full album just to get the one or two songs you wanted, you could just grab the individual tracks you liked.

(I do think we lost a little something in that period, because sometimes the best music that an artist produces is the stuff that doesn’t manage to hit the mainstream or get a ton of airtime — but I digress.)

In the same way, I think the blog post is kind of the ideal form of the written word. Books are big, bulky things that require several hours of commitment from the reader. When the subject deserves something of that length, that’s wonderful, but a lot of what makes it to bookshelves doesn’t fit the bill.

On the other hand, something smaller than a blog post (like a tweet, or a toot, or a skeet, or whatever the hell we’re calling a 500-or-fewer-character social post these days) often feels like a transient thought, and simply doesn’t have enough length to fully explore a topic or flesh out an idea.

But the blog post! What a perfect little medium. It can be short, if needed. It can be long, if necessary. It can be whatever it needs to be, but it usually manages to tell a story or share information exactly the way it needs to. I suppose, at the heart of it, a blog post is closest to an essay in the traditional sense. Whatever you call it and however you look at it, I find that material that takes somewhere between five minutes to an hour is usually just right.

Blog posts have been my favorite medium for as long as I can recall, and as long as you folks keep writin’ ‘em, I’ll keep readin’ ‘em.