A lack of patience with the stupid.
I've noticed lately that I've been reading the weirdest mix of articles and blog entries to the end, but closing, or bookmarking and forgetting, many other articles that seem like they should be of use or interesting to read. This really grabbed my attention last night when I noticed that two tabs I'd left open in Firefox since Friday involving stuff I can do to make my KDE install on my laptop lighter weight were sitting there without even being skimmed first, yet I ended up opening a link from a syndication feed talking about flu vaccines and antivirals, and how they may not be as effective as common perception believes, and finished reading the whole long ass article in one sitting. (Here's the article in question: Does the Vaccine Matter?) Not only did I read the whole article, I ended up wandering wikipedia on the topic for a little bit, and checking out information on other flu pandemics that have happened in recent history.
As of last night, I couldn't have told you why I was having this weird shift in focus, I know I have the attention span for long works of writing. Heck, I've been known to sit and read whole articles on wikipedia simply because it was there for me to read. Then it occurred to me when I was attempting to read an article on the Danger/Microsoft server failure fiasco. The problem isn't the content of the articles and the blog entries, it's the absolute failure in these articles to communicate. I was actually interested in what happened with the Sidekick server failure, because at one point in time I had been interested in owning a Sidekick. The people writing the articles spend too much time wanking, take forever to get to the point and basically I get bored waiting to get to the point and give up on the article.
As a person who considers one of her favorite authors to be Neal Stephenson, I should be able to claim I have some degree of patience when it comes to getting to the point in a written piece of work. However, I do also have a high level of expectation on the quality of the writing. If the writing can't be considered prose, if there isn't enough links to outside information or information included in the article to bring me up to speed on all the names being used, or if more than three-quarters of the article is occupied by random shit that doesn't actually reference the title that brought me in to read, I don't have the patience for it.