20th anniversary celebration badge label in golden color
Image by starline on Freepik
Twenty years ago, my friend and co-worker Jon decided to start a blog of his own — it was all the rage back then, all the cool kids on the internet were doing it — and offered me access to his new site to put up my own blog. You may not believe this, but in those days you had to pay money to an ISP for a web site like a blog and to install and administer your own blog software, so this was a kind and generous offer that I’d have been a fool to turn down. While I’d been an avid reader and commenter on other blogs, I wasn’t really sure what I’d do with my own little piece of the blogosphere, so I started off just making it an extension of my quotation collection with a bit of random commentary added.
Blogging isn’t dead, despite the innumerable obituaries posted by both bloggers and legacy journalists (whistle past the graveyard much?), thanks to newer initiatives like Substack and the continued self-destruction of the old media, blogs still have a place in the online ecosystem.
Typical blog content is really a modern incarnation of what used to be called “commonplace books” where a writer would collect information of interest that didn’t necessarily relate to the writer’s main interests or to anything else added to the book, as this summary explains:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.
I think that’s a pretty good description of most blogs, and certain is true of Quotulatiousness.
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Nineteenth anniversary
- Eighteenth anniversary
- Seventeenth anniversary
- Sixteenth anniversary
- Fifteenth anniversary
- Fourteenth anniversary
- Thirteenth anniversary
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon’s site — aren’t accessible any more. With the move to my own site, I switched from MovableType to self-hosted WordPress (currently running version 6.5.2).
