Common Place Books

A description of "Commonplace books " sounds very much like the eclectic nature of my (and many other) blog(s) :

These more undisciplined and disorganized commonplace books appeared in every permutation and degree of sophistication, and included nearly every imaginable type of text: lines of epic poetry, lofty quotations, and, just as often, medicinal and culinary recipes, ribald couplets, hermetical numerical tables, cartoons, monumental inscriptions, magical spells, bad jokes; in short, all the literary flotsam and jetsam of the more vigorous sort of reader.

Before the net, I actually had an unlined journal that I used for that purpose. Some newspaper cuts, quotes, drawings, poems, ect. These books "“often function as [arenas] for the shaping and consolation of a self” (p. 338)— sites for individual identity formation, reinforcement, and negotiation."

Farnam Street claims to think these collections spark creativity and recombination. He also explains that these books serve to extend the memory.

That self-shaping and self-understanding seem to be a common thread in the value of blogging. As Efimova suggests, Something akin to the oft thought concept of learning through writing or Composition Epistemology.

But do they also shape the unwitting readers of our blogs?

Perhaps with creative commons and the sharing economy, when we blog, we are not only building our commonplace books but end up adding to a collective commonplace book, one for all mankind.