Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

Big White Box Problem

I like this explanation of the value of new services like Quora:

As a blogger, you get good at this: finding inspiration from the things you observe elsewhere in the world and turning that into a unique and captivating blog post. Like getting good at anything, however, this takes time, effort and patience. Three things most people have very little of to dedicate to a pursuit like blogging. This is why, the biggest problem is blogging is the “big white box problem.” What, exactly, are you supposed to put in that big white text box when you start on your blog post? What topic should you even begin with? What topic will readers find interesting? It’s an intimidating thing to the newly initiated and even the old hands, and particularly to do it well.

Been thinking a lot about this lately.

February 4, 2011