The J Curve

We broke out a wonderful bottle of bubbly with some friends last night. The logo caught my eye... as I have a text blog called The J Curve.

Starting in mid 2004, I blogged on a weekly basis, then bimonthly in 2005, and just twice in 2006. My creativity there has withered, supplanted by a daily photoblog on flickr.

I have wondered why I find it so much easier to post a daily photo than to sculpt prose on any kind of regular basis. For me, the mental hurdle for a daily photo post is so much lower than text. A photo can be a quick snapshot, without much care for quality, and this is immediately apparent to the viewer. You don't have to waste much time with uninteresting images. With text, if I was to dash off a few sloppy and poorly thought out paragraphs, the reader would have to waste some time to realize that this was a throw-away post, or meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I hold myself to a much higher quality hurdle for linear media - something thoughtful and provocative - and so I procrastinate. Many of my text posts are repurposed material that I wrote for external deadlines (magazines, conferences, congressional testimony), without which I may never had crystallized my disparate thoughts into something coherent.

Maybe I am just a bad writer. It seems so much harder than visual expression.

Anyway, looking back, I think my three favorite blog posts are:
• The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution as paths for complex systems development.
• A review of Hawkins' memory-prediction framework for the brain with a comparison to the future of electronics
• Celebrate the Child-Like Mind