The Canary.

I felt, when I started this blog, that people would be able to enjoy my writing and maybe even learn a little bit from its contents. It's odd, though; I consider myself a decent writer, I try to keep all of my online writing simple and enjoyable. I think it makes sense, people aren't interested in being assaulted with complex verbiage. The Internet is a place in which writers should be free to write as themselves, at least, in an ideal world that would be the case.

Yahoo.com offers a list of tips and techniques for writing on the Internet... Take a second... Imagine the sort of advice an Internet mogul would offer...

It's quite disheartening. Yahoo proposes many useful techniques; techniques that all people writing for the a large audience should think about: be direct in your prose, make your opening and closing sentences interesting, craft an interesting title. Here, take two of these and call me in the morning.

I'm rambling, let's take a step back for a second
Yahoo insists that what I'm writing at this point in my blog post will not be read. In this article about eye-tracking, analysts propose that people only look at your title. I guess that makes sense, if someone writes a piece on the Internet that does not have a title that catches my attention then why would I read it? I'll just get to the meat of it: Yahoo claims that anything of value in web writing needs to be in the top third of the page:

• People scan the main sections of a page to determine what it’s about and whether they want to stay longer.
• They make decisions about the page in as little as three seconds.
• If they decide to stay, they pay the most attention to the content in the top part of the screen.

I guess I shouldn't be so bothered by this, but it's downright offensive to me to claim "web readers have the attention span of a goldfish." If people are only interested in writing with a content value no greater than that exhibited in a tweet, then I guess I'll have to be your canary.