A Commonplace Book

The May 2008 issue of First Things included a column by Alan Jacobs about his writing a commonplace book. Such books first appeared in the sixteenth century as a way for readers to cope with the panic of feeling swamped by information. In a commonplace book, one records notable passages from other works. Commonplace books eventually disappeared, replaced by journals of one's own thoughts.

Jacobs then compares these books to blogs:

It is curious that the history of the weblog, insofar as it can be fully understood, mirrors that of the commonplace book. The term weblog seems to have been coined by a very strange man named Jorn Barger, and for him it is simply a log of interesting stories he discovers on the Web.

(Barger's weblog is Robot Wisdom.)

But blogs are now most often online journals (see, for example, Further In & Higher Up, Mike Warner's interesting record of his journeys around Great Britain, Europe, and the rest of the world).

For those who do keep blogs with links to other web pages, Jacobs concludes with a warning:

The task of adding new lines and sentences and paragraphs to one’s collection can become an ever tempting substitute for reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting what’s already there. And wisdom that is not frequently revisited is wisdom wasted.