In our time, thanks to the talent and industry of those from the Rhine, books have emerged in lavish numbers. A book that once would've belonged only to the rich -- nay, to a king -- can now be seen under a modest roof. ... There is nothing nowadays that our children ... fail to know.

(link)

I've not tried this, so i don't know that it works, but it seems like it would. I want something like this so that the commonplace book can splash a random entry on entry.

$random_row = mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query("select * from YOUR_TABLE order by rand() limit 1"));

For the coverweb piece due in october, i need to start getting organized. I think there are two points i want to make:

we, the folks of computers and writing or at least some large subset, need to learn web programming

when it comes to rhetoric,there's nothing new under the sun.

put in that order those two points seem self evidently contradictory. but they're not really. every generation applies the rhetorical practices they learned from previous generations to their own circumstances, and just as "rhetoric" in the western tradition came about because Plato learned to write despite the objections of Socrates, so we need to consider how rhetoric computes.

I've chosen the commonplace for a campsite because it has everything one needs for a brief stay on the way to somewhere else. it's a temporary home leading to others. that's a bit cryptic. the word commonplace refers to an inventional technique that turned into a genre. it started out as advice about how to turn patterns of thought into arguments, and became a collection of potentially useful, instructive, or at least interesting quotations and in some cases observations. the notebooks a writer, preacher, any public speaker kept as preparation for future speeches. commonplaces were also kept by many people who never planned to speak in public, by women in the renaissance, for example, and by others who kept them as books like some of us keep diaries. only instead of personal ruminations, they tended to be catalogues of literary experiences. In some cases these catalogues were offered for sale, and thus people could have other people's literary experiences, read books, in a sense, they would never otherwise have a chance to read, books being rare and expensive.

Lechner, Joan Marie.
Renaissance concepts of the commonplaces; an historical investigation of the general and universal ideas used in all argumentation and persuasion with special emphasis on the educational and literary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
New York, Pageant Press [1962]

PN173 .L4

Moss, Ann. Printed commonplace-books and the structuring of Renaissance thought
Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.

PA2047 .M67 1996

"Creativity and the Commonplace"

At boxesandarrows.com (my favorite blogsite for the next 20 mins) I came across the following advantage disatvantage list set out to explain why metadata sites are preferable to content management systems. 

http://www.searchtools.com/

http://www.iawiki.net/FacetedClassification

http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html

Havens, Earle, 1971- Commonplace books : a history of manuscripts and printed books from antiquity to the twentieth century ; in conjunction with an exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 23 July through 29 September 2001 New Haven, Conn.] : Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library : Distributed by University Press of New England, c2001

PN245 .H38 2001

Here's an interesting piece from the late Wendy Bishop, formerly of FSU, (link) encouraging people to use discussion boards to create a sort of modern version of the commonplace book.

And then there's ChrisNet: a compendium of idiosyncratic knowledge, art, and humor that contains a list of key words  by which he's organized his input.

There is an interesting piece called "Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality and Electronic Cultural Production" (link) reproduced by Houghton Mifflin in Readings Online: a virtual common place book that discusses how plagiarism was once an accepted part of literary practice, along the lines of immitation.

Reminds me to wonder what the realtionship is between the practice of quoting at length and the practice of steeling at will.

A Commonplace Book: A personal collection of quotaitons  (link) is a searchable repository of quotations the composer finds interesting. There a collections of quotations about commonplace books themselves, (link).

"Commonplace books have their origin in the Renaissance as one means of coping with the information overload of that era. They helped students select, organize, classify, and remember key moral precepts. "

He goes on to say that over time a pattern emerges out of the chaos.

There's also "sprezzatura.nota: a commonplace - book"

And then there's //mad_lab

Suddenly I'm not alone.