In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use.
The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM tool like logseq, is that it forces him to clarify his thinking enough for public consumption.
This echoes Zettelkasten creator Niklas Luhmann’s sentiment that “it is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked fashion.” See PDF Communicating with Slip Boxes
The Commonplace Book as Hypertext
The commonplace book rose to the height of popularity around the 1600s, and was a way for people to collect and re-use knowledge. Some people kept a commonplace book for specific knowledge, such as formulations for different colors of printer’s ink. But the more general use was to collect quotations that could be used for any occasion.
One of the complaints about commonplace book keepers was that they didn’t actually read the writers whose quotes they were hoarding. See Not Reading in Early Modern England for more detail.
Then in the 16th century, Swiss physician, Konrad Gessner suggested taking a pair of scissors and cutting your commonplace book into individual cards. These could be organized in boxes and later spread across a table, remixed and recombined, until you had the basis for a new text.
This foreshadowing of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is just one of many versions of interlinked knowledge according to Chris Aldrich in his detailed posts The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten and Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains, which include floregia, detailed religious books, and “waste books,” the first drafts in double-entry bookkeeping.
So What Makes it Memex?
Doctorow places the commonplace book alongside a famous thought-experiment by Vannevar Bush about an electronic “brain” called the Memex. (This was also the name of Doctorow’s first blog.)
The correlation between these two historic knowledge systems isn’t fully developed but Doctorow does suggest that the modern blog is equipped with powerful information retrieval tools. You can add metadata in the form of topics and tags and you have full database search functionality.
This makes a blog not simply a tool for thinking and refining ideas. It is also a tool for finding those ideas when you really need them.
Also on Wild Rye
The public nature of blogs makes them a good way to Work with the Garage Door Up
Thinking of your blog as a commonplace book does not rule out thinking about it as a digital garden, an entry that grows, and has a sense of “place.” What is a Digital Garden?
