. Per .: I am doing the Ontol project (Github for knowledge / wisdom), which I was inspired, including by Vannevar Bush's thoughts about Memex. Memex speeds up the work of scientists tens and hundreds of times, reducing friction and access time to scientific information, Ontol is designed to 100 times reduce friction and access time to information that forms an adequate worldview. (Telegram channel: t.me/ontol )
I have been blogging for a little over 20 years and during this time I have written a little more than 20 books: novels for adults, novels for teenagers, collections of stories, collections of essays, graphic novels for adults, high school students and schoolchildren; a picture book for young children; and popular science literature on various topics. I have written and delivered several hundred lectures for various categories of technical and non-technical audiences, as well as for young children and adolescents.
During the same period, I have published many millions of articles in the form of blog posts. Not only did blogging not compete with my "serious" writing time, but it allowed me to write an objectively large amount of well-judged, commercially and critically successful prose that delighted many readers so much that they had to tell me about it - I inspire some readers rethink my career and life based on how my work made them feel.
There is a "why writers should blog" version of the story that is tasteless and self-serving: "Blog," the story goes, "and you will create a brand and platform that you can use to promote your work."
Almost every sentence containing the word "brand" is bullshit, and this is no exception.
Notebook for notes
From time immemorial, writers have kept notebooks. The author's equivalent of an artist's sketchbook is a “notepad” that can contain everything from newspaper clippings to grocery lists and attempts to capture those inspiring lines out of nowhere.
I'm sure there is a writer out there somewhere who is much more disciplined than me, whose notepads are legible, carefully indexed, and comprehensive. My personal notebooks are an unreadable, messy mess, written in such awful handwriting that it is sometimes difficult to be sure that they are in English.
Fortunately, almost my entire writing life has been digital. My computer dad introduced me to my first Apple] [+ in 1979, when I was eight years old, and since then I have been using digital systems to write, refine and reference my texts.
I have an endless number of working text files from the 1980s and 1990s that I took notes to myself. They are better than my real notebooks in that they can be searched and I don’t need to decipher my handwriting, but I cannot say that they are of great value to me as a writer. I cannot tell you when was the last time I contacted them. They are inert, more like log files than project notes.
Weblog
Peter "peterme" Merholz coined the term "blog" as a jocular shorthand for "web log" - a ship's log in which die-hard adventurers in chaotic virtual seas could record their voyages. Although “blogs” have always been free morals, there is a kind of platonic ideal of the blog that is directly present in the etymology of the term: the blog is like an annotated browser history, like the travel diaries my family kept on vacation, recording which hotels we stayed at and what they were. were, where we dined and what we ate, what local attractions we visited and how we treated them.
Like these family travel journals, a web journal is more than a memo, a record that you can refer to later. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is in its own way a powerful mnemonic that more reliably captures a moment in your memory so that it will be easier to remember in the future, even if you never check your notes.
The genius of the blog was not taking notes, but publishing. Publishing your file log requires a rigor that does not require keeping personal notes. Writing for a conditional audience - especially an unfamiliar audience - requires a comprehensive account, which I rarely collect when I take notes to myself. I’m much better at fooling myself with my ability to interpret my notes later than convincing myself that someone else will be able to understand them.
Writing for an audience makes me honest.
Nucleation in a supersaturated solution
If you are a writer, activist, or anyone else involved in critical synthesis, then the news, ideas, images and sounds that you come across may grab your attention: it is part of something larger and possibly important.
Every day I upload my giant tabbed folder, flip through my huge collection of RSS feeds, and respond to my social phones - mostly emails and Twitter mentions - and I open each promising snippet in a separate tab for reading and thinking.
If a snippet seems significant, I'll write about it in a blog post: I'll give the context why I think it's important, and then describe what it adds to the picture.
These repetitive acts of public description add each idea to the oversaturated subconscious decision of fragmentary elements that can become something more. From time to time, some of these fragments stick together and begin to crystallize a substantial synthetic analysis from all those bits and pieces that I have put into this solution of potential sources of inspiration.
This is how blogging complements other forms of more serious work: When you do enough, you can end up with whole essays, speeches, stories, novels spontaneously popping up in a state of near completion, ready to be written.
Be the first to do something that no one else has done before.
Clay Shirky described the process of reading blogs as the opposite of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, the editor selects (from the writers' suggestions those things that might interest readers) and then publishes (the selected works).
But for blog readers, the process is reversed: bloggers publish (whatever they think is important), and then readers choose (which of these publications is worthy of their interests). There are advantages and disadvantages to both choose-publish and publish-choose, and while the latter may require more thankless work of ignoring uninteresting text, it also brings more pleasure in discovering something that is both completely unexpected and completely wonderful. ...
This is not the only inversion that blogging entails. When it comes to (my) blogging method for writing longer, synthetic papers, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, the writer identifies the subject of interest and examines it, and then writes about it. In (my) blogging method, a writer blogs about anything that sounds interesting until the topic grows out of all these scattered, short articles.
Blogging isn't just a way to organize your research - it's a way to do research for a book, essay, story, or talk when you don't even know you want to write it. This is a way to find out what your future books, essays, stories and talks will be about.
Memex
In the 1945 essay, How We Can Think, we encounter Vannevar Bush's thought experiment with the memory expander, a machine that organizes the user's thoughts and semi-automatically merges related ideas to help the user synthesize disparate ideas and facts into new big works.
Memex has inspired bloggers from the earliest days of its form. Dory Smith called her groundbreaking blog her "reserve brain" ; Longtime Observer tech columnist John Naughton has been blogging for 19 years, which he calls "Memex 1.1" . I called my blog my "outer brain" back in 2002.
While an important piece was missing from Bush's inspirational vision of digitally expanding human thinking (posting notes as an incentive to note strictness), it nevertheless touched on a vital aspect of digital note taking: full-text search and tag-based indexing.
Although I started blogging for Boing Boing using Blogger Pyra Labs, the format has always been highly mobile, making it easy to migrate to Movable Type 6 Apart and then Wordpress Automattic. When I left Boing Boing in early 2020, it was easy to export my tens of thousands of posts from 19 years of writing and import them into my own private Wordpress site, which I simply called “Memex”.
Memex, coupled with Pluralistic - a solo blog I started after leaving Boing Boing - is a vast repository of almost everything I've considered important since 2001. When one of these nascent events occurs, the full text search and tag search tools built into Wordpress allow me to recall everything I have ever written on the topic, both for refreshing my memory on important details and for providing the web. links to expand related ideas.
Yesterday morning I wrote a 1500 word essay on web blocking, free expression, copyright and automatic filteringabout an hour between coffee and breakfast. The essay includes over 20 references to articles from the past decade, some of which I have written and some by other authors. This is by no means the last word I have to say on this issue (I have been working on this for over ten years), but it is not just a repetition of what I said earlier.
Rather, it is a synthesis of recent events with earlier events, interventions, scandals and actions. It is also an evolution of my ability to convey these complex and thorny ideas based on the perception of earlier works on the same topic.
Change your priorities
Having a deep, digital, searchable, published and archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be a waste of time - or even harmful - into something valuable.
For example, it is difficult to write long and fruitfully without being distracted by recollections of some of your own works. After all, if the purpose of writing is to express your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your old work will be more confusing.
Holding back one's own memories is of no use to anyone. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your old work to find patterns where you got it wrong (and rightly so!) Is extremely rewarding — it's a rewarding process of introspection to help you identify and avoid your own pitfalls.
For over a decade, I've been going back to “this very day in history” from my own blog archive, looking back a year, five, ten years (and then eventually 15 and 20 years). Every day, I've been rolling back my blog archives to the present day in years past, pulling out the most interesting headlines and posting short blog posts with links to them.
This structured daily work of analyzing where I have been is more valuable in helping me think about where I am going and what I can say.
Everyday habit and community
There is another way blogging helps me write better: daily writing makes daily writing easier. When I was a young writer, I thought that the recommendation to “write every day” was highly desirable, such as “do an hour of aerobic exercise” or “eat five servings of vegetables”. I deeply regret the years I waited for inspiration before writing (and how I regret the years when I didn’t get adequate exercise or nutrition) because of all the practice I missed and the habits I was too waited a long time to develop.
And while I never intended to blog in the hopes of “building a platform” (or worse, a brand), publishing my own interests helped people with similar interests find me, and vice versa. Some of these people buy my books (and vice versa), but more importantly, they are a community.
This is the latest inversion of blogging: not just posting before choosing or researching before you know your topic, but building to attract, not serve, an audience. Traditional editors determine the audience that will pay to publish them (or who the advertiser will pay for coverage) and then find a writer who can talk to that audience. As a blogger, I enjoyed the insane freedom to write exactly what I wanted to read, which would then attract other people who think the same way.
Two decades later, I can confidently say that this community of like-minded people, mentors, good listeners, protégés, friends, fighters and interlocutors is more useful for me as a writer and person than even the colossal instrumental benefits that blogging brings to my composition. process.
Corey Doctorow ( craphound.com ) is a science fiction writer, activist and blogger. He has a podcast, newsletter, Twitter page, Mastodon, and Tumblr. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest popular science book, How to Break Down Tracking Capitalism. — “ ”. Radicalized. — “, ”. YA- — “ ”. — “ ”. : “” ( ), ; Red Team Blues, - , ; “ ”, -GND .