I thought about this maybe too long for my blog. What I finally decided was that I wanted something to indicate length, because "do I have the patience for this" is probably the most fundamental kind of question for content. At least in broad strokes, I'd consider it as conceptually important as marking posts "not safe for work," in cases (which haven't come up) where it's relevant.
However, I didn't want an actual time, since--like you point out--it sounds bogus. Do I read 120 words per minute? Do you? Does a child? Does a screen reader? How do the numbers change in a distracting environment?
Ultimately, I went with a rounded word count. We all know what a word is. If readers care about their reading speed, the readers are at computers that can divide just as well as I can. That said, I haven't done any rigorous research about this.
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I thought about this maybe too long for my blog. What I finally decided was that I wanted something to indicate length, because "do I have the patience for this" is probably the most fundamental kind of question for content. At least in broad strokes, I'd consider it as conceptually important as marking posts "not safe for work," in cases (which haven't come up) where it's relevant.
However, I didn't want an actual time, since--like you point out--it sounds bogus. Do I read 120 words per minute? Do you? Does a child? Does a screen reader? How do the numbers change in a distracting environment?
Ultimately, I went with a rounded word count. We all know what a word is. If readers care about their reading speed, the readers are at computers that can divide just as well as I can. That said, I haven't done any rigorous research about this.