For about a year now, I have on a monthly basis been writing a chronicle for the Computer Sweden magazine. I receive a software developer related question in various software areas each month. Most of these chronicles can be found here, but you will need to be able to speak Swedish in order to understand them… J

However, each month I do end up with the same kind of struggle: to shorten the chronicle to the text length I am allowed to have. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. On the contrary I think a chronicle should be enjoyable and somewhat light weight to read, not covering too much details and especially not be too lengthy. In short: enjoyable to read. Don’t know if I accomplish this really but I do my best.

However, it is really difficult and a very special art of writing to be able to be precise and tell something meaningful on a limited length of text. I believe it was August Strindberg, a quite famous Swedish author who once said: “I do not have time to write short”. Now, I am definitely not comparing myself with Strindberg but I do understand what he means. All too often I have been writing emails to my colleagues at Dotway that perhaps have been a few pages to long (pages being a metaphor obviously... J ). Some colleagues have even coined such long mails as “Tobias mail”… all to my utter frustration of course. I dare to say that I really do try to shorten long mails down, but sometimes this just takes too much time to go all the way. I always do spend long times reviewing such long mails so that the structure is ok and understandable and that spelling and grammatical is ok. Anything else I think would be disrespectful to whomever I am writing to since I am opting for precious time on my account.

As a side note: The last couples of month I have a couple of times successfully changed tactics going from quantity to multiplicity … J Maybe this is the road to take.

When it comes to the Computer Sweden chronicles, the editors leave me no choice and I really have to spend time to be brief and consistent. Even though I occasionally has slipped the quota and received a gentle and friendly mail distributed slam on my fingers from the editors, most often I have been able to keep myself at a maximum of 120% of allowed text length... Anyway, I am thankful to the Computer Sweden for giving me this opportunity to practice being brief and nail those specific points.

So why am I writing all of this? Well first of all because it is my blog. I can write whatever I want in it without bothering if people will read it or not. Second of all, in the last chronicle I wrote, which is supposed to be published soon, I did add a reference in the end of it to my own blog. Why? Because the topic, web 2.0, is huge! I actually have a lot of more thoughts on the subject than what I could fit into the chronicle. And the chronicle being a web 2.0 chronicle, it seems like the perfect ending for it too. J So after this --- ehem --- rather lengthy blog post, I intend to get right at writing a blog entry about web 2.0.