Digital Garden

From “writing articles/posts in a traditional blogging sense” to “planting a digital garden”

• Evergreen notes
• What is Digital Garden? by iamrobin
• GitHub - MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
• Digital Garden Terms of Service
• Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies

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• Problems:
  • Paginated, linear, newest-first sorted (sorting posts by dates) oriented list of chronologically posts aren’t how people actually use the internet. They search via Google to find stuff, which is free-form and task-oriented → Curation is more important!
  • Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.
• Advantage: enabling to leverage the knowledge of other mind explorers / fellow gardeners and contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence. ¹
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (maggieappleton.com)
  • A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organized by their publication date.
  • Inherently exploratory
    • linked through contextual associations (bi-directional linking) to connect notes together. (while a blog may usually be explored in chronological order)
  • not refined or completed yet → always rough drafts, WIP (work-in-progress) & is evergreen—digital gardeners keep on editing and updating their notes → can be published as raw, unpolished, half-finished/baked/formed thoughts that will incrementally grow, evolve, and build up over time (while posts/articles/essays in a blog have a strict publication date and quickly start decaying/become outdated as soon as they are published since the author will learn new things)
    • less rigid, less performative, and less perfect
• The Stream v.s The Garden
  • The “web as topology” or the “web as space”: Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships
  • We create the garden as a sort of experience generator—so that the visitors can have unique yet coherent experiences as they find their own paths through the garden.
  • In the Stream metaphor: You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
  • In the garden: You walk through, look around it, and follow it to its end.
  • The Stream replaces topology with serialization—rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.
• Streams (Twitter), Campfires (Blog), and Gardens (Personal Wiki)
• Write to share&learn v.s Write to teach
  • “I blog to share and learn. rarely teach. I think the imposed pressure on the latter keeps a lot of blog posts from great people hidden.”
• Long Content
• “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience. With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself—you focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”
• The Digital Garden - DEV Community
• “Gardens and parks lie between farmland and wilderness. The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity. The park is wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. Since most hypertext aims neither for the wilderness of unplanned content, nor for the straight rows of formal organization, gardens and parks can inspire a new approach to hypertext design and can help us understand the patterns we observe in fine hypertext writing.”
• My Digital Garden is a growing collection of thoughts, ideas, and knowledge I’ve gathered from various topics that spark my curiosity. The notes are synced directly from my Obsidian workspace, making this space a living reflection of my evolving interests and discoveries.
• Like online representation of your local vault. Not to be confused with blog like content, more of a work in progress that never ends and always evolves.

Footnotes

1. Crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing” coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, to describe how businesses (digital platforms) were using the Internet to “outsource work to the crowd.” It involves attracting and dividing work between a large group of dispersed participants to achieve a cumulative result. The online dictionary Merriam-Webster defines it as: “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.” ↩