New, huge trend in Internet… I mean twitter of course – gave us some benefits… to our lives, to our websites, to our jobs. Twitter has changed methods of communication and promotion. However it’s not hard to refer the impression, that it does not remained without effect on our behavior and methods of reading the real, long articles.

I use various of micro-blogging sites… I use twitter and its local counterparts such as the polish blip.pl whether flaker.pl. So from my own experience I can say for sure, that the micro-blogging websites changed the way in which we read the articles.

Recently often I realise the fact that within half an hour or an hour I can “read” dozens of articles, while browsing the hundreds of other titles of texts, which I consider to be more or less interesting and, for example, mark them as read in my RSS reader.

Sounds good, right? But it’s not. It’s not a good score.

Maybe first… how do I do it? Not by a rapid reading courses. My way is to read articles, and even the titles of the articles not accurately. Quick look on the text – and if my eye could find two or three interesting keywords in the text – I can spend more time on it, if not – I want to go to the next article.

Thanks to twitter I was able to significantly reduce the number of articles in my RSS reader. I unsubscribed all these feeds, which was less interesting, or all of these feed, which have too much informations and unnecessarily caused a lot of confusion in my RSS reader. Instead of RSS feed I prefer to follow these sites or users ontwitter. As a result, my RSS reader is much more orderly. And when it comes to information from other sites – I am with them on a regular basis, because all of the informations from these sites are on my twitter account.

Thanks to that method I can save a lot of time, while preview a lot of text in a day. However it’s not always a good way… for two reasons:

1. In some articles, it’s hard to find interesting keywords, without reading whole of text. Is it due to bad formatting of text, either because of poor distinctions of interesting keywords. Because of that, I can lose really good article, that could be interesting for me.
2. But much worse thing is that I can no longer focus on a single, long text. When I read some – even really good – article, after a few sentences… I realise, that I have already forgotten about what I read, because I am thinking about dozens of texts, which are waiting in the queue to read.

So… although there are only more interesting articles in my RSS reader – I still can’t focus on them.

All of that because of twitter. All of that because of lots of short messages, informations, links, titles, questions, answers and all other things, which I need to read day after day on my twitter account.

I feel like a 5-year old guy, who can not concentrate on the one thing at once.

I have to learn it back. I have to learn back how to focus on one thing – especially on one article – at a time… because all of these texts were built to be read, not for a previews. I think that authors deserve it.