Cory Doctorow on How Weblogging Made His Brain What It Is Today

“Cory Doctorow: The Memex Method. When Your Commonplace Book Is a Public Database: ‘The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic…. The genius of the blog was… in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not…. Repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate…. When one of those nucleation events occurs, the full-text search and tag-based retrieval tools built into Wordpress allow me to bring up everything I’ve ever written on the subject…. The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters—or even harmful—into something valuable…. Systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial—it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls…. Two decades in, I can safely say that this community of peers, mentors, sounding boards, protégés, friends, combatants and interlocutors is more useful to me as a writer and a person than the even the prodigious instrumental benefits that blogging brings to my composition process… ”