The Blog as Commonplace Book
I really enjoyed this article on The Millions by Shaj Mathew which compares blogs to commonplace books. I think that it’s a really good analogy. At least that’s pretty much how I use this blog.
If you’re not familiar with commonplace books, they were scrapbooks which most educated Europeans and Americans used between about the 17th and early 20th centuries. The were commonly filled with all sorts of notes, aphorisms, recipes, and formulas.
For the most part, they were intended for the author’s own use. In some cases, however, they were published after the fact. In the case of some authors, they can be quite interesting. See for example:
