Article Too Long? Didn’t Read It? Hello, TLDR.IT

Wouldn’t it be great if the Internet came with Cliff Notes so your already-shrunken attention span could be assaulted some more?

Wait; that question was too complex. OMG, LOL and ROTFL, TLDR.IT

The old adage about how you only have seconds to get someone’s attention is becoming more and more true; with an unlimited set of sources from which to get your information, the Internet has made attention spans impossibly short.

Or, shrinking that:

I Don’t Remember How To Read.

So the ideas we tell our kids are bad (“No, you cannot read the Cliff Notes version of To Kill a Mockingbird!“) have become real. I can tell you that when I try to read a long article on the Internet, get to the bottom of page one, and see there are fourteen more pages I sometimes stop right there. I’m not proud of this, by the way.

So what if there was an editing tool that made everything you find on the Internet shorter? There is. Look at TLDR.IT (Too Long, Didn’t Read It).

It’s really just a concept at the moment, and to be honest it doesn’t work that well, but what if TLDR.IT learned to be a better editor and got built into web sites or browsers?

I ran this post about Customer Service at Nissan of Manhattan through TLDR.IT, for example, and the results were awful. But the idea is intriguing.

Not good, by the way; intriguing. But wait, I’ve run too long; your attention is waning.