Blogs as Modern Common Place Books

18th January, 2024

I rarely feel an urge to write about things I fully comprehend. More often than not, such regurgitation feels like a chore. I might do it to spread awareness on an issue, but rarely for its own sake.

Instead, I find it more exciting to write about things I don’t yet fully understand, where new information has become available or where I want to clarify my thinking. In other words, to “write so that I know what I think,” or to “write what I need to know.”

Blogging is my tool of choice for this task.

This concept of blogging as a means of thought exploration can manifest in many ways. But for me, it typically starts with reading. And often, this means reading other blogs.

A while back, inspired by a post by Cory Doctorow on what he calls the Memex Method, I got into the habit of checking into my RSS reader every morning. Among the few dozen feeds I have saved are news sites, quirky directories, literary journals, personal blogs, and weird zines. Each day, I browse through these feeds to see what, if anything, grabs my attention. If something does, I’ll often blog it or save it to a long list of ideas I’d like to explore further.

The meaning of “blogging something” can extend anywhere from sharing a link on a micro-blogging site to a full-blown essay with further contextual reading, sources, deep reflections (hopefully), and self-references to previous ideas and stories. But no matter how comprehensive or basic the blogging is, the result is a kind of online commonplace book.

Since forever, writers have been keeping commonplace books as places to record events, quotes, thoughts, and fleeting ideas. But the magic of both commonplace books and blogs is not their ability to store information. Rather, it is in how that information compounds over time to reveal new insights and moments of inspiration as new entries are added.

However, blogging has several advantages over analogue journaling. For starters, there is rarely any need for referencing or indexing systems. Instead, all you need is some form of fuzzy search or tagging. Another significant advantage is that it’s public.

No matter the note-taking systems I use offline (and I’ve used quite a few), they’re always vulnerable to foolishness and ineligibility. After all, a “note” isn’t beholden to anyone. Meanwhile, writing for the public requires refining and presentation.

Preparing a piece of writing for publication is like tidying your house before hosting a dinner party. Sure, you might have been content in your mess before, but the promise of visitors demands you do some sprucing up. So, you inspect those gaps in your knowledge, double-check what’s behind your perspective and unclutter your thinking. In my experience, it’s only after setting yourself upon this process that you realize all is not as orderly as you thought.

Research shows that this act of presenting and explaining (or “teaching”) things to others helps make information stick (see: The Protégé Effect). I’d venture that it doesn’t matter what exactly you’re explaining. Whether it’s a technical how-to guide or a day in your life, all reflections are enhanced by the act of publication.

Of course, I’d be remiss not to mention all the collaborative benefits (both direct and indirect) that come with blogging. Blogging can feel like a solitary venture, but while the “blogosphere” feels now like an archaic term, there’s still something magic about putting a post out there and observing where other people on the web take your train of thought.

The concept of commonplace journaling is, I believe, kept alive and made greater through personal blogs. As software engineer and blogger Ana Ulin writes in her own reflections, it not only creates tangible artefacts of our current understanding but guides future thought and writing:

“Keeping a blog, the modern commonplace book, is a good way to see our own progress. It makes our endeavors have a more tangible manifestation. The process of collecting, transcribing, reflecting and archiving, is in itself a helpful method to cement the things in memory, and also to make them easier to find and revisit in the future. A lovely tradition.”

A wonderful tradition, indeed.