Thursday April 28, 2005

Essays, Blogs and Oracle Licenses

I recently discovered the essays of Paul Graham. I referred to his essayThe Submarine in my last posting. Another one of his essays that I just read and found extremely interesting and engaging was titled The Age of the Essay.

Graham's essay about essays is full of interesting ideas but I particularly liked his point that an essay is a train of thought, not, as we were taught in school a defense of a thesis. He says “ I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.” It seems to me that a lot of blog entries are in fact essays. Just as the best essays are interesting the best blog entries are interesting. Graham says that interesting means surprising. He says that if you are writing about things that you have thought about and a point was surprising to you then it will be interesting to the reader.

So, for example, in a town hall meeting with Scott McNealy last Monday McNealy said that because of the way Oracle prices their software it is possible for the Oracle licenses to cost a lot more than the Sun computers they run on. He quoted some very large and surprising numbers. I believe it was something like the machine costs $10,000 and the licenses cost $300,000. That was new to me and both interesting and thought provoking. Since then I've read similar information in Dave Brillhart's blog and in Keith Bierman's blog.

It is not a new idea that an essay or a blog should be a conversation but I like the idea that they should be the kind of electrifying conversations where ideas are flowing and my mind is being expanded and challenged. Graham ends his essay with suggestions for how to find surprising things to write about. I find it it inspiring.