It's worth writing it down, even if you don't know who the audience is yet

There are times when you need to write something down and publish it, not because you think that you know who needs to see it, but simply because you need to know that you can find it again by searching for it.

The internet is vast and ever changing, and rather than rely on your ability to search for what you once found, try making a copy of the relevant portions (with whatever annotations you need to provide a context). Even a paragraph worth of clipping, when added to a paragraph of insight, is enough of an anchor point that if the original goes missing you can still reconstruct that understanding of your own.

The tradition that you are drawing from is of the commonplace book.  Happily, I wrote about this a few years ago, so now I can quote from myself:

7. Quote from people who you respect. An early writing practice was a "commonplace book", where the literate people of the pre-Xerox, pre-Internet day copied out by hand passages from other works that they wanted to save and make their own. Pieces of poetry, bits of news, copies of messages you want to fix in time, can all go into a blog stream to be commented on and added to. Tip: only quote from people who you respect, because the last thing you want is to be on the top of a search queue for something you don't care anything about.

It looks like Harvard has a nice collection of commonplace books online:

The commonplace book has its origins in antiquity in the idea of loci communes, or "common places," under which ideas or arguments could be located in order to be used in different situations. The florilegium, or "gathering of flowers," of the Middle Ages and early modern era, collected excerpts primarily on religious and theological themes. Commonplace books flourished during the Renaissance and early modern period: students and scholars were encouraged to keep commonplace books for study, and printed commonplace books offered models for organizing and arranging excerpts. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries printed commonplace books, such as John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books(1706), continued to offer new models of arrangement. The practice of commonplacing continued to thrive in the modern era, as writers appropriated the form for compiling passages on various topics, including the law, science, alchemy, ballads, and theology. The manuscript commonplace books in this collection demonstrate varying degrees and diverse methods of organization, reflecting the idiosyncratic interests and practices of individual readers.

A part of the blogging practice is the practice of collection, and the commonplace style is the response to the need to make copies in order to make something your own and for future use.

Comments

[Mark D. Adams]

I totally agree. I do this all the time. Especially if I tried to google the answer to a question first and failed. Once I have the answer, I'll blog it for other googlers, and often times for my own reference. :)