Non Stop Portals

By Jerry Helms

I read a lot of web pages and articles on the Internet.  It seems as though my attention span is decreasing by the day.  I am having trouble focusing on any paragraph that is longer than five lines of text.  Is it just me?

I think that part of the reason is the 140 character microblog.  What's that?  The maximum text message size on Twitter.

Is Twitter really making me become more Attention Deficit?

Probably not.  I suspect my ability to focus on long paragraphs and articles has not changed much over the years.  I know that I am not the world's best writer, but I even get bored writing long dissertations for any purpose.  I'm finding that while writing this article my primary purpose is to use short paragraphs to get the message across and not repeat myself.  And not repeat myself.

I also have recently learned a valuable lesson about presentations.  My old style was to write fairly detailed Powerpoint bullet points.  In reality, my Powerpoint presentation was an outline of what I wanted to say.  I attended a presentation last week that used this technique.  My reaction to the presentation was to wonder if the presenter knew that we could read?  My lesson learned was to summarize words more on the slides and add my words as a part of my presentation.

Boy, writing compelling content for a web site and making effective presentations is hard work!!