Online Trend Demands: Say More With Less - Or Else

By B.L. Ochman
Information overload, data deluge, inbox overflow, the attention crash: call it what you like, we are all drowning in inputs. The answer? A rising tide says learn to say it in less words -- a lot less words -- or lose your place on stage.

Stowe Boyd wrote last week that from now on twitter is the sole medium for companies to pitch him and Drue Kataoka at ValleyZen discusses the merits of expressing ideas in 10 words or less.

Can it be done? You bet. Part of my fascination with Twitter, besides the sheer delight in hanging out with a few thousand of the smartest people in the world, is that complex ideas are expressed in 140 characters or less, or they're not published. Here are just a few examples:

@AdamBoettiger ARTICLE: "How to turn your iPod Touch into an iPhone and make voip calls from it"

@CathleenRitt Who wants to call my father to tell him I'm leaving my job because a. it no longer exists, b. to pursue entrepreneurial projects? Not me!

Jim Long @AnnBernard CEO of http://whygosolo.com/ gives us an important entrepreneurial gut-check this morning

@Pistachio social media is not just a layer between the company and the stakeholders, it is the business itself. and it is NOT new, it's just different

@gapingvoid Note to random PR folk: I'm busy. I don't care about you or your product. Your overt and uninspired solicitations are annoying.

@stoweboyd @steverubel It's the transition to a web of flow from a web of pages. The conversation moves to where the velocity is,away from async to sync

Ryan Karpeles. Twitter is like a giant petri dish of ideas. They develop, grow, mutate, etc. And we get to watch it all under our micro(blogging)scopes.

@karenswim only on twitter can techies, bloggers, marketers, writers, twenty somethings and work at home moms happily gather in one great conversation

@BarbaraKB Twitter is twitter: Simple. Discipline. Chatter. Information. Giggles. Relationships. Links. Opinions. People. Feed. Oy.

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/whatsnext

In the spirit of your post, BL ---

Excellent!

-Drue

Did you see? Scrolling random Twitters on a public billboard for the peep in all of us...(actually, it's part of an ongoing "social experiment")

Even as is, it makes me smile.

http://twistori.com