A traveler evolves through the experiences he encounters on his journey. All of us are on a journey, but what we call that journey is determined by the scale: When we were born, we began the journey of life, but when we awoke this morning, we began the journey of this day.
When we read a book, we're on a journey laid out by the author. You're reading this email right now, experiencing subtle thoughts and emotions as you read these words.
If you're reading a book and you come across an interesting passage -- a piece of the journey that causes you to pause and reflect -- you might stop and write a note in the margin of the book. If someone else picks up that book and comes across the same passage, they would see and read your note, enhancing their own journey with yours.
By recording and noting experiences on a journey, a traveler leaves a trail for others, empowering them by sharing a unique perspective.
We still read books, but now we also explore the greatest source of human knowledge ever assembled. It's a source so full of variety, so rich with stories of human experience and perspective, so alight with ideas and opinions, that it equates to an ever-expanding storybook of humanity itself.
The Internet is a world of knowledge, ideas, thoughts, and experiences, a great tapestry of human ingenuity woven together to form the web.
If there was ever a place of exploration in which to keep and share margin notes, this would be it.
There's lots of stuff on the web, some of it great, but most of it regurgitated noise. When I come across something that makes me stop and think, those little pieces shift the journey of my life ever so slightly. They shape the way I work, live, and think, adding to the journey of my life.
But those bits and pieces do their work and then they disappear back into the web. I could send out Tweet or quote them on Facebook or Google+, but then they're just disappearing back into the noise of the social web.
If those pieces affected my journey, there's a good chance they might affect yours as well, so I've decided to start collecting and sharing them with you. Doing so requires very little time investment on my part -- I copy and paste from a web page into a text file, annotate with a sentence or two, and then continue reading. (Once a week, I format and publish these bits to my site where they're stored.)
As part of your Journal subscription, you will receive on Friday's my Marginalia, a weekly email containing my margin notes for the web.
These will be little pieces -- a quote from a blog post, a piece of an interview, or even a transcribed passage from a physical book -- that I felt shifted my evolution in some way. I will annotate these bits with my own thoughts and link to the original articles where you can read them in their entirety.
By saving, annotating, and sharing these pieces with you, I'm giving you the same opportunity for insight they provided me. These notes will be stored on my site, so I'm also creating an archive for myself and, as with all my paid work, they will automatically become publicly available within one year.
Do you collect notes on the interesting stuff you read on the web? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of doing so?