A person’s attention can only be divided so far before any further split is pointless. In this way we are more like Pop Tarts than most of us care to think.
When I was a little girl my brother and I liked to make our Pop Tarts last by breaking them in two and eating the smaller piece, then breaking the remaining piece in two and eating the smaller piece, and so on. Two things in this exercise were always true: First, no matter how hard you tried to split a Pop Tart evenly, one side was always going to be larger, and second, eventually you give up and shove the whole thing in your mouth.
The digital age has done this to our brains. When we had only print media, we could absorb radio without much sweat, and later when there was television we made room for that too. Our reading time shrank, but it was still there. When the Internet “happened” we had to break ourselves into even smaller pieces to absorb the new thing. Then it got worse—because the Internet was not just one thing, but instead a platform for many things. So now, we have had to break our attention into pieces to take on Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, good sites we like to check in on, the New York Times now and then, Pinterest, and a little surfing to see what else is new.
Our brains are now smashed into fractions; in Pop Tart land, it’s time to shove our brains into our mouths.
With this in mind I’ve learned a few things about writing for the digital media on my road trip.

Lesson #1: Dogs and guns rule. If I put Colby into my Facebook news feed, it will get more attention than any picture of me ever will. Unless, that is, it’s a picture of me with a shotgun; my shotgun-toting status update drew more comments than any other…so far.
Lesson #2: People like clicky stuff. By this I mean fun clicky stuff, certainly not annoying pop-up type “click to make it go away” stuff. I put up a few versions of a road trip map that got attention. I think deep down we are all looking to recapture the feeling we had as very small children when we for the first time we got a toy that responded in some way to our touch, as if we were in command. For small children today, the Internet IS that experience, but for big, old kids like myself, the internet recreates the sensation of “gee whiz.”

Lesson #3: Get to the point immediately, and keep the whole thing short. Not proud of that knowledge, simply possess it. And so I’ll say no more. If you have read to the end, you are an angel; leave a comment please!