[The delightful copy from May 15, 2012.]

"Hello, I'm Max Fenton.

Knowingly or not, I've enlisted friends, peers, and strangers to unpack a puzzle that involves reading and writing on networks and screens.

You can follow along or participate by reading, clipping, grokking, assembling, questioning, and sharing—while making a path. You'll need electrons, a wish to explore, and an eye for how these pieces might fit together in novel shapes and forms.

My trails are charted through twitter, tumblr, pinboard, readmill, reading, and 2nd hand [flavors.me]."

[As shared on Twitter:

"Made my site a little more accurate [http://maxfenton.com] then read @pieratt's "Transparency" http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/23108094947/transparency-in-the-evolution-of-technology — Yes."

http://twitter.com/maxfenton/status/202477843534454784 ]

[See also: http://twitter.com/rogre/status/202481485633159168 ]

"Even if we can capture intention and overcome sharing, we might come back to consider what was formerly known as the commonplace book. How might new book designers — of any format — replicate its sense of wholeness and real-time cataloging online? Do we need to?<br />
<br />
It’s critical that the new book designer consider how and where these marks might be shared. I’m not suggesting that all annotations be social lest we become self-conscious in our book-relationships. One of the principal pleasures of taking notes is the intimacy with a passage, the outright honesty with which one might scribble, “Gasp!” or “Hogwash,” or “True that,” for later reminding. But there will need to be equal consideration given to what to keep personal as to what to make shareable.<br />
<br />
After all, some sentiments are best left between you and your margins."

"I’d like a more flexible, faster all-in-one inbox for my digital detritus. For some reason, DevonThink, Yojimbo, & Evernote aren’t cutting it for me. Tumblr is close, but not quite it. I’d like something that successfully handles images in tandem w/ text, because that’s how my brain works. I have this dream of having a management interface very similar to a hybrid of LittleSnapper & Yojimbo, & then a “serendipity engine” application for iPad. It’d be a bit like Flipboard where things are served up at random from your collection for browsing. That’s the flaw of all of these things, in my mind: they encourage you to get things in, but aren’t optimized for revisiting it in a way that lacks linearity or classification. If you’re looking to make constellations of content, I think the way your collection is presented back to you matters. I guess what I’m asking for is a digital rendition of the commonplace book, & serious rethinking of what advantages digital could provide…"

"[with] Digital magazines … I should be able to do all those things I do with my current magazines, only better, faster, and with way more ease. … instantly tag, share/email, bookmark, rip out and organize my tear sheets … look only at the things I’ve saved, regardless of their source. … magazines are appealing because they are curated. The fact that the reader can rely on a trusted advisor (read: editor) to compile and deliver information on a given topic is a relief. They don’t have to go out and gather the sources, someone else did. Also, they like to see content presented in an orchestrated order. This method of delivery is innately satisfying. Additionally, readers appreciate that the content is not going to change from when they first sit down to read the magazine til they finally finish with it. The fact that in our rapidly-moving society something stays inert is reassuring and comfortable. People rely on magazines as an opportunity to tune out, as Bonnier calls it “Quiet mode.”

"I’ve been more struck in the last few months with how I’m storing material up in Instapaper, going back to it, archiving things that once I would have bookmarked straightaway in Delicious, ruminating over others and then, finally, sending myself an email reminder to bookmark X later. And later frequently, now, means Saturday — when I have the time to deal with what has become a sizeable backlog. More filtering happens at that stage, too.<br />
<br />
Delicious (backed up locally and in Pinboard) has assumed a different role in my life. No longer the bank of preference for instant notes, it’s where I’m putting things that I’ve generally sifted or gone back to (sometimes a number of times)… I’m much more interested now, much more able now, to use Delicious as a repository for things which I’ve had the time, and the perspective, to weigh.<br />
<br />
All of which makes Delicious, or something like it, even more important. And I haven’t even begun to talk about the network."

"By providing us with new ways to share what we’re doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future."<br />
<br />
"The current philosophy underlying most of the real-time web is that if it’s not recent, it’s not important. This is what we need to change."<br />
<br />
"I believe we, as makers of online services, have an incredible opportunity to ground the things we create in both the present and the past, making them — and thus ourselves — richer, more beautiful, and more human.<br />
<br />
But first we need to catch archive fever."

"brings us full circle back to “Web 2.0’s” origins in what Delicious creator Joshua Schachter has called a “memory platform.” …there are some powerful social memory experiences possible that aren’t yet appreciated by an industry (and public) preoccupied with “The Now.” The immediacy of services like Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram is a powerful incentive for average people to fit journaling into their daily lives. But, as Matt Jones points out, in many ways “The Now” is the least interesting part of the spacetime light cone. Without deep access to archives, and compelling ways to navigate them, real time services are falling short of their true potential."

"I differ slightly from Rachel in terms of where it all lives. She uses DEVONthink, a program with which I’m admittedly not completely familiar. I’ve played a lot with Evernote, and whilst it kinda did what I wanted it to, there was always something vaguely uncomfortable about the mass of different types of information in there. Notes, screengrabs, clipped web pages, links, photos. It was all in once place, but it all seemed a bit disorganised, which was the opposite of what I wanted.<br />
<br />
Instead, I try and use one piece of software for each task.1 I stick my bookmarks in Delicious, my lists and notes as plain text in Simplenote (by way of Notational Velocity), my photos in iPhoto and occasionally Flickr, &c. In short, one thing well." [Something similar to this works for me too, though I'm not really sure whether it's because that's best for me or if it's because I've invested so much time in specialized buckets. And the "Only Collect" article is a gem — glad to see it pop up again.]

"Johnson devotes three chapters to serendipity, error, and “slow hunches,” each of which can be a source of creativity and which, according to Johnson, can be harnessed by individual researchers. Countering the usual curmudgeonly complaint that the Web kills serendipity, Johnson argues that the ubiquity of mobile computing makes new forms of serendipity possible: “If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.”" [via: http://lukescommonplacebook.tumblr.com/post/1322255880/if-the-commonplace-book-tradition-tells-us-that]

"Norman Constantine left a really striking comment on a post here recently, saying:

"Bri­dle says read­ers don’t value what pub­lish­ers do because all of the time involved in edit­ing, for­mat­ting, mar­ket­ing, etc., is invis­i­ble to reader when they encounter final prod­uct. Maybe. But mak­ing that time/labor vis­i­ble CAN’T just mean brusquely insist­ing that pub­lish­ers really are impor­tant & that they really do do valu­able work. It needs to mean some­thing like find­ing new ways for read­ers to engage with that work, & mak­ing that time mean­ing­ful as THEIR time.

"“commonplacing,”...transcribing interesting/inspirational passages from reading, assembling personalized encyclopedia of quotes...central tension btwn order & chaos, btwn desire for methodical arrangement, & desire for surprising new links of association...rereading of commonplace book becomes new kind of revelation...holds promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in new way w/some emerging obsession...words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, w/out explicit permission/consultation, new awareness could take shape...connective power of web is stronger than filtering...partisan blogs usually 1 click away from opposites...[in] print or f2f groups [leap to] opposing point of view...rarer...reason web works wonderfully...leads us...to common places, not glass boxes...journalists, educators, publishers, software devs, & readers—keep those connections alive."