Should we be producing LESS content on the web?

Scott Karp wrote a fascinating blog post about cutting down on the amount of content you produce, to avoid polluting the web. He advocates that writers reduce the amount of "stuff" they put out there, using effective linking strategies instead so as not to duplicate something that's already available on the web. His reasoning is why should you regurgitate, when a simple link will suffice?

It's something I've never thought of before. There's unlimited space on the web, right? (Ignoring things like the cost of storage, server costs, etc.) But Scott is saying there is a cost involved, and that cost is the amount of time people waste when they're trying to filter information.

It reminds me of a lot of the spam I used to get a few years ago. I haven't seen one of these in a while, but perhaps some spammers might still use this. The footer of the spam message would say,

Please Save the Planet, Save the Trees! Advertise via Email. No wasted paper! Delete with one simple keystroke! Less refuse in our Dumps! This is the new way of the new millennium.

Yes, that's true -- spammers don't waste paper to print direct mail. But countless hours of productivity are wasted each year by spam. (I'm sure someone has a study out there somewhere that quantifies how much time the average person spends weeding through spam, but honestly it's going to be such a big number that it's near meaningless anyway, so I'll conserve resources by not trying to find a link!)

So just like countless hours are wasted each year fighting spam, Scott asserts that since there's so much content out there, it's wasting people's precious time to go through it. Wow...producing less content? Can our Internet society handle such a radical idea?

So here's another way to look at it:
The answer isn't writing about less things, it's simply writing less about the same amount of things. According to Jakob Nielsen's recent column, users are reading at most 28% of the words on the average web page.

So if content creators identify the 72% of wasted words and don't write them, the problem is solved and everyone is happy! Everyone still gets to communicate, but there's no waste. Brilliant!

But like the old advertising adage goes, "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half," how will writers know which 28% of their content people are reading?

(If you haven't already figured it out, this comment is at least 28% tongue in cheek...)