About

It seems to me that certain thoughts come to me again and again, year after year. This blog is an effort to document the ones I’m most obsessed with.

Frequently, others have come to the same conclusion as me. Therefore, many of these posts will simply consist of links to (better) authors with annotations as necessary. My workflow:

Come up with interesting hypothesis or thought. Write it down in a text file.
Over years, store related observations from myself, friends, blogs, books…
If a text file gets very large, I know it is high time to organize it for posting:

If references are non-existant or poorly-written, create original content.
If references contradict my own observations, I’ll attempt to explain my position and reasoning. Feel free to bring tomatos.
Ideally, additional points of view are comprehensive and well-written. Organize them into effective hierarchy and add annotations as necessary.

My hope is that these posts will evolve into canonical collections of high-quality links on subjects of interest. My differentiating aspect over sites such as del.icio.us will be my editorial filtering abilities and annotation quality: I have a keen eye for effective voice and a background in library and internet research.

Benefits

I am embarking on this project to:

Strengthen technical writing muscle: it simply takes me too long to write.
Stop repeating self: different friends ask me for help/view on same things.
Showcase interesting thoughts: thinking takes up a large chunk of my life. (Or so I’d like to believe.) Instead of trying to be breadth-wise comprehensive, like most content aggregators, I’ll attempt to be as depth-wise comprehensive for the narrow slice that does interest me.
Showcase quality content: the problem with open publishing is the vast proliferation of useless content. I aim to enforce a high standard of quality for the references on this site. The paragraphs might be a lost cause.
Force myself into critical-thought: it is too easy to save an article with delicious without actually incorporating it into world view. This is analogous to summarizing a chapter of a textbook into a sentence.

Timeline

2009 - 2010: First pass. I have a collection of roughly 100 text files with jotted notes and sources on various interesting ideas. Need to get them to a bare-minimum level of quality (expand shorthand, find sources, remove expletives, etc., etc.) and post them up. Quantity over quality.
2010 - 2011: Second pass. Start doing extensive editing on each post to draw out central themes and expand depth of research. Explore using different voices to keep audience engaged. Quality over quantity.
2011 - 2012: Secure book deal, get published, and retire to little-umbrella paradise island villa.