No sooner than I post a reading review [3] that compares blogs to diaries, a Metafilter post [4] proffers the idea that blogs most represent "commonplace" books.
Certainly the myriad content found in a commonplace book, including diagrams and illustrations, reflects much of the current "blogosphere" where topics drift from one post to the next and taken as a whole resembles an ad hoc compendium. Ultimately, however, the comparisons between blogs and diaries or commonplace books must necessarily be made in general terms -- perhaps as a way to describe archetypes of blogging rather than all blogging. Certainly we have seen both diary style and commonplace book style blogs; why try to narrow the description of such a widespread networked information type to a single physical container type?
Fortunately, the extension of the metaphor does little to change my argument -- that the use of such metaphors is useful for helping traditional archivists think more clearly about preserving networked information.
