July 31, 2009, 9:38 am
The question “How long is the ideal technical video?” recently came up in an internal O’Reilly discussion. People chimed in with a variety of opinions, ranging from “I like something an hour long that’s really meaty” to “If it’s longer than 2 minutes, there’s no way I’ll watch it.” These sorts of basic product attribute questions are crucial elements in any product or marketing strategy, but it’s often simply too difficult or expensive to get timely information when you’re trying to get a new project going.
However, a quick script that pulls data from a relevant website’s API can often give you an answer that’s good enough. It’s certainly not a definitive answer, but introducing real-world data into a conversation has a wonderful way of helping people focus on core assumptions…
