Blogging and tweeting in the 17th-19th centuries

At least that's what the following bit from Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From made me think of:

Darwin's notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a "commonplace" book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters - just about anyone with intellectual ambitions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of this period - Milton, Bacon, Locke - were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, "commonplacing" as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one's reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing's virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to "lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.

... The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. For some Enlightenment-era advocates, the systematic indexing of the commonplace book became an aspirational metaphor for one's own mental life ... Others, including Priestley and both Darwins, used their commonplace books as a repository for a vast miscellany of hunches.

... Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke's scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

(From p. 84 - 87)

Random meandering tales. Short blurbs of interest. Seems to resemble many a twitter account or blog. Perhaps something like my personal wiki might be a still better approximation. This seems like something distinct from writing in a diary (and is something that I think a lot of research-oriented jobs still encourage).