The nice thing about blogs is that they're infinite. There's no word limit, no copy fit, no sense of filling up all the space you have. If you want to write a 10,000-word polemic about your subject, go ahead and pound on the keyboard like a Fox celebrity boxer.That said, blog entries typically come in packs — you hardly ever get a blog entry all on its lonesome. So the tradition is to keep blog entries short — a screenful or less.
Postings to Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom weblog are a single, punchy sentences. Movable Type and some other blogging engines allow you to create a "preview" block of text that links to a "full text" block for longer entries.Infinite space aside, as with all writing, your blog entry should take exactly as many words as it needs to make its point, and not one word more.Some blog authors play at mystery in their postings, writing deliberately obscure things like "Boy, this sure must have hurt!" and nothing else.
The idea is to pique the reader's interest with your pith and jocularity, so that he follows the link to find out what it is that hurt so much. I try never to do this, operating on the principle that the best way to get someone to follow a link is to describe what's on the other end of it and why it's interesting.
