No one writes anymore.

You know what's better than a witty idea packed into a <140 character sentence? The same sentence followed by an elaborative paragraph for the time when the words don't speak for themselves, which is all the time.

I liked to joke about design on the internet and the turnoff that was a graph of text longer than a sentence. "No one reads anymore," I would state cynically. But the same joke doesn't sit so well today, instead I would say: "No one writes anymore."

Writing on the internet can be described in a word, 'curt'. People now write with the same shorthand abbreviations and literal stand-ins they formerly spared for texting, but texting, tweeting, commenting, (*sigh*) 'Like'ing, has steadily eroded the cultures stamina for writing. Instead of Blogging, people are Blurting; instead of spelling people are spurting out character sequences with cryptic meanings.

The result? Good Godson! Just look at Twitter, it's totally illegible. Gangly strands and clumps of characters that read like a corrupt text file. Honestly, a compact tweet requires more decoding than reading, and decoding is what good software is supposed to do FOR us.

I'm as guilty as anyone, I tweet more than most users I know, and the forgiving Lord knows I've written off his people as 'ppl'. And while I'm kneeling in this e-Confessional, I can tell you the 'ppl' message ultimately sucked.

Everyone who writes faces this problem. Saying more with less is considered artistic. When you hash out a good post, you want to tighten it down like a Mac Truck lug nut, so you twist paragraphs until they squeal upon the kerning, but you're still wondering if it's road-ready. People are going to be reading this, and their impatient, erratic gnat-minds will fly at the first participle that dangles lifelessly.

Or maybe the whole thing is beginning to feel like a Vaudeville act? The proverbial hook will emerge from behind the web page and yank you into browser history. You can suffer a few tomatoes to the face but will anyone allow the show to go on? You're a human being, not a deformed circus attraction! Fuck it. Apologies, Joseph Merrick.

I'm willing to bet 90% of bloggers who gave up saw twitter as the summation of what was wrong with their readership. Most probably migrated to twitter, traded in page hits for followers and never looked back.

The truth is, the Internet needs you to write like Fantasia needs Bastian. This is NeverEnding story is about you, but is slowly ceding to the Nothing (or 'Null' as it's referred to in computing).

Do you think people gave up on blogs? No, they gave up on writing them. Our world may be shrinking, but in doing so we are drawn closer together. This is the dawn of a new era, a fresh <P> tag for the fillin'!

Happy keying.