As I continue to think about blogging, and why I blog, and what I want this blog to be, one idea that comes to mind is “The Commonplace Book“.

I first read about Commonplace books in this old article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian (which I read a lot):

What to do with … information is one challenge of the modern field of “personal knowledge management”, but 18th- and 19th-century literate types had a pretty good answer:

the commonplace book.

John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Coleridge and Jonathan Swift all kept such books, copying down proverbs, poems and other wisdom they encountered while reading.

Oliver argues, though, that such collections should be kept private, not shared.

But – one – most of my looking is done online so it makes sense for me to save it here and – two – maybe someone else will copy what I found and use it in their blog? And maybe then good will triumph over evil.