Blogging is about annotating our mind
This method was first mentioned in 2024-08-18_08-52 Writing Inbox in iA Writer.
These are my highlights from reading The Memex Method—Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow.
The blog as an annotated browser-history
Is blogging like adding annotations to browser history? If you mainly blog about things you found online, sure…
Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones – primarily emails and Twitter mentions – and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.
So, his primary source is his web browsing. That’s fine.
My primary blogging sources also include my ideas. Maybe that’s why having a Zettelkasten is important at the end. Perhaps I should also keep a tab open for my ideas? I love the idea of fragments being opened in tabs. This is a nice metaphor since macOS tabs exist in the UI everywhere, so they provide a simple UI for fragments of information in apps that are made for browsing and managing information.
In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.
So, blogging on its own can be a Zettelkasten-like way of emerging ideas as we develop them. Why do I need my Zettelkasten, then? Maybe my blog is my Zettelkasten. I think a Zettelkasten can help thread ideas together in an outline format, forcing ideas to emerge.
Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research – it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.
Blogging is a way of discovery, so blogging about something should be like date-ordered public thinking. Tags are subjects of interest. Maybe I should have more specific tags, like “Mac app renaissance.”
- Maybe I should even add descriptions to tag pages.
To conclude, my Zettelkasten is one of the backbones of my blog, along with journaling and browsing the web.