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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why the other comment's been killed, but this is blogspam.

Original story here, from the ones that actually interviewed Wozniak: http://anewdomain.net/2012/04/26/apple-founder-inventor-stev...

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"Listen to so-and-so interview Steve Wozniak" is hardly what I'd call interesting reading, and I do not want to listen to a bunch of people say "Umm" for an hour and a half just to get five minutes worth of information. It's nothing to do with ADD even — it's just that I have only 16 waking hours in my day, and even fewer free, so that isn't a good use of them. Putting information in text format adds value.

That original post didn't really emphasize the interesting part, so I'd argue that the secondary blog posts that picked up this story are, in this case, actually more useful to the average reader. Still, it probably would've been better to link to WPCentral (http://www.wpcentral.com/co-founder-apple-steve-wozniak-choo...) which first found out about the interview and dug up the quotes.

I wouldn't say it's blogspam, but linking the original source is still preferred. (Although here it seems to have gone down!)

(Blogspam originally implied a blog post that copy-pastes the entire original article, possibly adding one or two sentences of "commentary". This article clearly has more meat than that -- it's at least a good faith effort to provide some context.)

Blogspam also includes linking with just a short quote.

In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.

Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

In a world of short attention spans I particularly want to listen to a podcast of the "Woz" because this is not the normal corporate gibberish that strongly contributed to the "short attention span".

The occasions they let the Woz out are rare enough.

Or as they say - listen and learn ;-) (and thanks for all the links)

In a world of short attention spans, listening to Woz talk while I dick around on the Internet is actually pretty appealing to my ritalin-deprived self.

In a world of short attentions spans oh look an eagle!

This whole talk about low attention spans, is it backed by any real research? I'd have thought folks on Hacker News would have longer attention spans. After all, most are developers who need to get into the zone when coding, and often read copious amounts of documentation. This sort of thing requires concentration!

So what you're saying (as heard from someone looking to get into the software developer field sometime soon), is that as a developer you still do a lot of documentation reading and you dont just have it all stored upstairs?

If so, that is actually encouraging!

You'll always be reading in this industry :-)

Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source.

This may be a good lesson for writers to learn (imagine how a pageview-whore would summarize your article, then summarize it yourself), but in the meantime we shouldn't encourage it IMO.

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