It seems like everyone is writing manifestos these days - here is a D. Keith Robinson's on useable content. This is a subject I'm very much interested in. Although I do not create any of the content on the sites I work on, I often feel compelled to help edit some stuff down to manageable chunks. I like Keith's list of what useable content is. You can pretty much boil it down to Steve Krug's mantra "Don't Make Me Think" and I think I'd also add Don't Make Me Scroll. I think any user faced with more than 3 paragraphs of dense text on a webpage quickly glazes over and loses interest in fully reading the content.

To that end, I realize there are times when content needs to be text heavy and I wonder if we can't emulate the way journals present their material - with the salient points in an abstract first, and then if the user wants the full text provide a "full-text" link that presents them with a print-ready page formatted for easy reading.