We don’t really need a Reason to Be, but it certainly helps to occasionally step back and look at a larger picture.
What is Occam’s RazR?
What do I want it to be?
It’s not what we saw from the first incarnation of the “personal weblog.” I don’t share everything here. I have Facebook, and a Twitter account that I use for short thoughts. (I even started a “My Quotes” category to archive the witty pieces that shouldn’t be so ephemeral.)
I have a Posterous site, “Ike’s Online Scraptacular,” for the pieces that don’t fit in other places.
I occasionally contribute at Media Bullseye and Calling John Galt, so as not to litter this space with thoughts in niches.
So if I am segmenting my online output, what goes here?
Bucket needs a label
I suppose I need to refocus and answer that.
Or I can take the lazy way out and say “It’s whatever the heck I want it to be about, on any given day.” But that doesn’t help the reader develop a consistent expectation. And even if I don’t have a purpose for this audience, it doesn’t mean I ought to waste its time with scattered meanderings.
So, this is what I will try to live up to:
- Occam’s RazR will be a site about exploration and explanation.
- Occam’s RazR will be a site about communication and cognition.
- I want to write about thinking, and how we can strip away assumptions to arrive at truth.
- I want to write about writing, and how we can more clearly enunciate what we mean.
- I want to write about process, and how we delineate what we can understand from what we can’t.
- I may write about football, or politics, or economics, or television, or any of a host of topics that might seem to emerge from nowhere. But I will always aim for the spirit of revealing the hidden truth, the missing link or the unsupported assumption.
- I will do my best to bridge from knowns to unknowns.
What am I missing?
I know I am missing elements, but I want them to be explicit and not implicit.
I worked for a news manager once who got a lot of mileage out of sending me to places where news was happening, with the gameplan of “Send Ike there, and let Ike be Ike.”
That’s not enough. I want the outsiders’ perspective of what that means.
So tell me…
Hi Ike,
I had to think for a minute about why I read your blog. Well, not why I read it, but what I’m reading it for.
My response: What you do at the core is “writing about thinking.” Whether it’s a familiar topic or something a little more wacky, your posts always make me go “hmm,” challenge an assumption, or otherwise make me think. For me, everything else on your bullet list is just an example of how you do this–not what you do.
My food for thought. Â –Daria
Hey Ike, Vulcan here. I read your blog because either, you say what people are thinking but can’t/won’t say it out loud, OR you think through an issue using a thought process (see above comment) or an analogy that gets the point across in a clear and simple way. Usually an analogy that we would not think of. Clever feller you are.
Ike,
I read your blog and tweets because you bring common sense to issues on which it’s increasingly uncommon. I can always count on you to get to the real relation, the underlying theme. 😉
-Nedra
Gratuitous Rush references are always welcome.