“That commonplace books (and other personal note-books) can enjoy this special status is supported by the fact that authors frequently treat their notebooks as quasi-works, giving them elaborate titles, compiling them neatly from rough notes, recompiling still neater revisions of them later, and preserving them with a special devotion and care that seems out of proportion to their apparent function as working materials.”
— Wikipedia on Commonplace Books
“They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.”
— Robert Darnton on the same
The main difference between writing on the web and writing a commonplace is that the former is decidedly public. Writing for the public changes your mindset massively, not just in the form of privacy and things that you'd dare to write, but also in experimentation and voice, which seeps into the very mode of thinking.
It's a bit like the old question about what philosophy achieves: Dawkins says somewhere that science has given us many things with obvious utility, but that philosophy gives us nothing concrete at all. But wars are often as ideological as they are economical or based on other motives; ideas must matter to us. Ideas are what gives women the vote now; they're what gives *anybody* the vote now. Juries are an idea, shops are an idea. And on the other hand, technology (which is what Dawkins mainly means when he says that science gives us concrete benefits — what does it profit us to know the diameter of Neptune? we're considering this in Dawkins's view, remember) doesn't have to be necessarily useful, or just useful. Cars are dangerous as well as useful. Antibiotics are making bugs stronger. We're running out of oil and polluting the planet.
So anyway philosophies & mindsets are important, and I think that commonplacing is not being replaced by writing on the web. It's perhaps necessary to say this — I saw Richard Holmes arguing for something like the other point of view recently.
by Sean B. Palmer