One of the great, definitive abbreviations for the social web is TL;DR. It stands for too long; didn't read, and epitomizes the short-attention-span crowd, the willfully idiotic segment of the online population that 1. we all sometimes belong to and that 2. makes for the shittiest experiences on the web.
The TL;DR impulse is both the engine behind and the scourge of the web communities. I'm reminded of this fact because a conversation with an acquaintance referenced Jay Rosen's Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over, in the context of my own The Blog Cycle. Jay Rosen, of course, is one of the smartest and most far-seeing experts on the intersection of blogs and journalism. He's also the definitive creator of TL;DR content: It's so smart, so dense, and so lengthy that I wonder if even he has ever read to the end of one of his own blog posts.
There are a million manifestations of this delightful demon; It popped up for me when I realized that a recent New York Times story had some fairly significant revelations about a company in the tech industry. The news wasn't anything revelatory, but I had assumed the information would spark a number of startled blog posts on highly trafficked sites. The next day, though, silence! Why had everybody ignored the big story? The answer was obvious: The key quotes were tucked away towards the end of a 1,000 word article. If you ever want to hide some information from prying eyes, I'd suggest offering it to the New York Times.
The final beauty of TL;DR is of course the fact that it's an abbreviation at all. Spelling out the concept would of course take too long to read.
(Thanks to Bryan Partington for the CC-licensed image.)
Are you going to let us know where we can find this recent NY Times article with the revelations or just keep us wondering?
Don't worry; you've already read it. :)
So, that's a 'no' then?
Is it too obvious a joke to merely comment on this post: "TL;DR"?
No?
OK, then.
TL;DR.
The last time TL;DR came around it was MEGO ("my eyes glazed over"). Ref. Usenet, circa early 1990s.
That's funny, I thought "TL;DR" was the writer's way of saying why they didn't write for the reader: "Too late; didn't refactor".
There's another saying in this vein: "The meaning of a message is the response it elicits." If a writer can't get to the point, then do they actually have one...?
True, but not confined to the web. I often thought it would be an interesting project to take quotations from the 'great works' of literature, philosophy, etc, and graph out how early on in the original book they appear. My gut says that a majority would come from pretty early on.
Perhaps I should spend a week reading only the second half of newspaper articles, and see what overlooked nuggets of information I stumble across.
tl;dr