There’s one thing Twitter has done and that’s change the language of reading news and stories so I’m going to try an experiment.

Regardless of however things work out for Twitter it has had one unmistakable effect on the way articles, essays, and other writing is presented. When you look at Facebook, Apple’s News app, and almost any site like Recode or The Verge, nearly everything looks like a tweet. You click on it to read the article.

Now, it’s always the case that there’s nothing new under the sun. Headlines with snippets have been popular at least going back to the 80s, if memory serves and I’m sure that, if I took the time to do the research, I could find that story snippets are as old as news publishing itself. I believe I recall in the 80s when newspapers started publishing a sort of index on page two of tweet-looking headlines and snippets. Magazines have done the same thing on their index pages for a long time.

Still, the shift in the look of any story-collecting web site or, more importantly, phone app has changed so that they all look strikingly familiar.

So, at the risk of appearing as a trend follower, I’m going to try breaking my blog stories so that there’s a shorter blurb on the main page and you click to read the full story.

I guess there’s a risk here when the blog post is mainly there to share a link since you might have to click twice but maybe not. Those posts just won’t have the “Read More” link but the actual story link itself. After all I can always do what I want here. I can grow back the main page piece as much as I want when I want. That’s part of what’s great about keeping your own blog.