Blog attention deficit disorder (BADD)

Tags

aesthetic values, attention span, BADD, Blog attention deficit disorder, blog junkie, RSS, white space

I declare that I have a solid case of BADD!

It’s so baaadd (haha!) that sometimes I just don’t get around to commenting on all the blogs I love to read. At least not straight away. And then sometimes just not for ages and ages, so it seems kinda pointless… it’s a problem I freely cop to.

First up, I’m a blog junkie – I have around 300 blogs in my RSS, all nicely organised with various folders (Yoga blogs, PTSD blogs, techie blogs, eye candy – aka visual blogs, blogs I always want to read, blogs I can survive if I don’t read for a bit etc). They are also organised based on how frequently people post and all kinds of ways to make things manageable.

This sheep also has a case of the BADDs...

But I also rely on my blog reader for another thing – getting rid of the distractions that some people call design elements (no offense intended!).

If there’s too much going on with a blog – in terms of side bar elements, or colours or banners etc, I tend to lose focus and find it hard to read. So if I like the blog but the design causes too many distractions, then I tend to only go to the actual blog for commenting.

Which means that for me, it’s much better all-round if people let their RSS feed display full posts, instead of only the first paragraph or so.

I guess you could say my aesthetic values tend towards minimal design. Luurrrvvve me some white space, I do! Yep… the more white space and black text on white backgrounds I see, the more I like it.

(Of course, there’s always exceptions to the rule and some of my favourite blogs don’t meet the above description, yet I still adore them.)

Really though, anything that tears my eyes away from the text (including lack of appropriate paragraph usage and poor spelling) – and I am VERY easily distracted – makes it difficult for me to stay interested. It’s a weakness, I’ll admit it!

I think that’s partly to do with the number of blogs I read (as in, I get a bit exhausted from it all no matter how much I love it), but also because I lack a decent attention span when it comes to reading things online.

I KNOW I’m guilty of this too sometimes (although I do try hard to edit properly), but something is overly wordy or badly composed, I find it hard to finish. Even short blog posts!

It’s almost as if I need the things I read to be visually beautiful to look at, and when the words bounce around my mind, they need to resonate and invoke passion or imagery or… something! It’s one of those intangible things that can’t easily be qualified.

Then, EVEN if the writing is good and I usually like that person’s blog, occasionally I still can’t make myself read all the way through posts… or I’ll have a post open in my browser for days, trying to finish reading it and working out what I want to say. On account of the thoughts/feelings/mood evoked in a post.

Sometimes I can’t even stand to re-read my own writing once I’ve published it, and I can even lack the energy/desire to go back and edit something that really needs it. True story!

Honestly, I think my responses to such things are a little extreme. But that’s kinda just how I roll… it’s the reason I can read one book and not another, or be okay with only certain movies, regardless of their high/low brow status, how well they’ve been made, the actors or the director…

So it’s not personal if I don’t always write comments. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say. Other times, I’m overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.

But the other possibility is that I just that I have a chronic case of the BAADs.

And I don’t think there’s medication for that just yet… 😀

~Svasti