People have a very short attention span and, if recent studies are accurate it is even shorter when viewing things on line. One article I read recently (sorry can’t find the link again) said that a recent experiment shows that the majority of visitors will not watch an online video beyond the three minute mark. The same article, supports others I’ve read over the past few years, suggests that on line visitors will abandon a long post after the first few paragraphs – I know I won’t read a post that is interminably long, even a good one!

Based on these pointers I’ve come up with a working rule of thumb: 3 min. or 300 words. We’ve not got too many videos here – for some reason it seems more difficult to make a “Theo-vid” than it is to make some of the more fun and free vids you can view on “the other site”; but I’ve been putting the 300 word “rule” into practice here for a couple of months and it does appear to be having a positive effect on visitor numbers which have been inching upward since its introduction. There is an element of discipline toward brevity involved that for theologians can be, rather tricky to master.

A quick survey of my outlines for this and future posts in the series highlights the element of “discipline” involved in better god-blogging. Something that one can easily see fitting into an existing spiritual practice, such as prayer, study, and charity – in this case I think I’d call it sharing and engagement.