Unfortunately for his argument, Greenspun seems to be unfamiliar with the history of the magazine.
He writes:<p><i>"Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines, such as the old New Yorker would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system."</i><p>This is simply untrue-- there have been, over the past 500 years, many magazines and journals publishing 20-page pieces. The shortening of the average magazine piece is an artifact of the past 75 years. To view the history of publishing as one monolithic period from Gutenberg to the Web is absurd.
For some reason, whenever I read Greenspun's writing, I get the feeling it is written partially tongue-in-cheek.<p>This particular article is mostly on the mark, but in the world where everyone's thoughts are heard, filtering becomes extremely important.
Where are those 20 page essays on the web? The typical blogging format seems to be 2 paragraphs and a link to someone else's 4 paragraphs. Or maybe there arent enough people with anything thoughtful to say.
This article was disappointing. I thought he was going to identify the salient features of writing designed for the web. Hopefully he will in his talk.
I'm not sure about his thesis, but I like his evidence. e.g.<p><a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-to-care-about-others-when-we-have-professional-therapis/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-to...</a><p>"Being poor is caring about your friends" (paraphrasing)