Stuart Brown wrote:

@Mike - Yep, 500 words is probably better for the search engines - there's a bit more 'meat' to the content then, and more chance to get your keywords in.

Doesn't mean people will read all of it, of course :-)

Also: self promotion ahoy! In the absence of any 'Digg It' buttons, I'll do this manually:
http://digg.com/tech_news/How_Long_is_the_Ideal_Blog_Post