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Earnest but still solidifying #pkm take:
The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.
When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."
Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.
@ryanrandall the technology space is particularly egregious about ignoring prior art
@mstine @ryanrandall It won't go as far back as we may like, but I'm hoping Mark Bernstein's upcoming talk will help to remedy some of the lost knowledge: https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0
In part I blame Vannevar Bush for erasing so much history in As We May Think (1945).
@chrisaldrich @ryanrandall thank you for sharing. This looks fascinating.
@ryanrandall I think about commonplace books often. I spent a chunk of my MFA looking at them for poetry along with hypertext and the Memex.
Now that I'm in the MLS I'm swimming in thoughts about knowledge management and organization, but I feel a lot better about the open-source options than buying a tool or service.
@Xanadu Cool! I feel very similarly. I like the existence of all the tools, feel much more comfortable with open-source and especially local-first options, and think about it more often than I'd expect. 
Do you have any personal faves at the moment?
I've been using Dendron for almost 2 years now and profoundly like it. It just has more of a learning curve than some other options. https://www.dendron.so
Otherwise, I really like Zettlr, especially if someone has any need to include citations in notes or especially output. Zettlr combines really nicely with Zotero!
@ryanrandall I've been using Obsidian(which isn't open source) for notes and some tabletop stuff, but I'm still very basic doing this on a computer (handwritten comes naturally to me but it's hard to go back or find things quickly).
Dendron and Zettlr look super cool, I'll check those out. I've had some struggles beating my head against Zotero, but my collection of pdfs is getting out of hand so I'm still looking for a way to organize it all.
@Xanadu I've heard really good things about Obsidian!
My handwriting is really bad, and I can type much faster than I can write, so that's why I tend to lean toward doing this on computers. Also, search comes in really handy when I know I've written about something, but can't figure out where.
Hope you figure out what works for you! If you've got any questions—or if you want to share any cool approaches—I'm all ears.
@ryanrandall I heard about Obsidian and Logseq after joining Mastodon and my first thought was oooh, this is going to take my Commonplace book to the next level, lol!
@ryanrandall what do you mean by common place books? Do you mean regarding those personal wiki / digital notebook tools?
@carter Thanks for asking!
By "common place books," I pretty expansively meant something like "how humans have kept notes-to-themselves in a single collected place." The wikipedia entry is close to how broadly I meant that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
And yes, I definitely meant this in the context of the newer personal wiki / digital notebook tools. I'm a very big fan of those tools in general! I even have favorites! I was just being grumpy about how people are turning a centuries-old practice into a field for marketing specific approaches and tools, rather than focusing on practices.
I really appreciate how people like @chrisaldrich try to remind us of the longer history of these practices.
Here's one of Chris's many posts about commonplace books: https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/
@ryanrandall @chrisaldrich the bit about index cards to make stuff easier to cohere is definitely a nice one
@chrisaldrich @ryanrandall I did order the book on note taking to at least try out. Idk if that workflow with index cards is sane for me though. I’m used to writing as a medium for thinking rather than notes I go back to. Though maybe that’s a failure or anxiety behavior on my part
@ryanrandall @chrisaldrich I have a literal shelf of append only mathy science and biz bits from the past decade