How long should a blog post be?

The ultimate answer to "How long a blog post should be?" comes from Abraham Lincoln (yes, the president).

Abe Lincoln was once asked "How long should a man's legs be?" After a brief ponder, he replied "Long enough to reach the ground".

Length of a blog post is probably one of the most debated aspects in blogging. Some bloggers stick to short and frequent posts, and some stand by comprehensive, essay style posts. Yet the majority uses a mixture of both styles.

Research shows that the attention span of online readers is shorter, compared to people reading pieces printed on paper. The average time a surfer spends on a blog is around 1-1.5 minutes. Most internet gurus advise to keep post length within the range of 250-500 words.

I personally don't like one-liner posts that just link to another page. Especially if I had seen the same link on a dozen other places before. True, there are some popular blogs that do just that. They can get away with that, because they have already established a stance, and the readers more or less know what to expect from links in that blog.

For a more earthly blog, though, I think it's best to at least put in some opinion or review of what the linked page offers. And also, don't bother posting a link about the story at Digg, unless you have some original things to say about it.

I would much prefer to read an over-lengthy post than one with a few sentences and a link. You can always stop reading a long post if you lose your interest. There's this myth about web surfers not being inclined to scroll. How is that possible? We scroll all the time! In fact, we scroll so much that mouse producers have introduced the scroll wheel. Why should we become so arrogant and resist against scrolling down, when it comes to a web page?

And why am I writing this post? Well, because there were many other things I wanted to write in that previous post about Blogger Beta. But since it was a "first post", I got impatient and posted it away hastily. So now I'm just preaching myself.