keep it short

June 21, 2007

I recently picked up a book titled Bit Literacy after reading about "achieving emptiness" on one of the blogs I read. The book is an interesting and easy read so far, but I'm not done yet so I'm not yet going to say that I recommend it. While reading it I got inspired to write this post because of something that Mark Hurst says in the book on "Creating Bits":

"To be clear, the goal of brevity isn't to conserve computer memory, or somehow to go easy on the "plumbing" in the network. For all but the biggest files, there's plenty of bandwidth to transmit them across the Internet, and plenty of hard drive space to store them when they arrive. Hardware today is powerful and abundant, and it's getting more so all the time. What's scarce is the time and attention of the people who are receiving the message. A bit-literate message, in any form, is respectful of that scarce resource. This means:

- When writing an e-mail, be short and to the point.
- When displaying photos, only show the best ones - never duplicates or bad shots.
- When creating a website, make sure the point of that site is clear from the first glance of the home page.

There are many other kinds of bit-based messages for which the same rule applies. In all cases, the constant question should be "Is this necessary?", asked at every level: "Is this paragraph necessary? This word? This pixel?" The bits in any message - whether textual, visual, or otherwise - should be as few as necessary to deliver the message."


I have followed this exact way of thinking for years out of sheer frustration from receiving e-mails that are pages long which really could have been boiled down to a few sentences. Always I hoped that with my brief responses that the verbal diarrhea offender would get the hint and begin to trim down the e-mails to be sent. I am glad I am not the only one who thinks this way, and on that note I will end this offensively long post.



Posted by christopher andersson at 1:40 PM

just noticed this

June 12, 2007

A few good friends of mine were in town during the Oscars for a film that they scored called Jesus Camp. They put together a nice little re-cap of the week on their site, but I didn't notice it until now.

The amount of information that I consume a week (which pales in comparison to some people) is enormous, but if I can't consume the RSS feed it's almost guaranteed that I won't see it unless it is brought to my attention.

I gotta get these guys a feed!



Posted by christopher andersson at 4:37 PM