Digital Gardening

A digital garden is an alternative to blogs or essays, in that they aren’t organised linearly by time. Posts or notes might start as incomplete ideas that will be added to or evolved over time, growing more connected to each other. They’re intended to be explored through rich inter-linking. They’re usually more personal and less performative than other written content published online. Reading a digital garden feels a bit like peeking into someone’s brain.

This is similar to How to Take Smart Notes (2017), Sönke Ahrens and Evergreen notes, although published on a website instead of a private knowledge base. Many digital gardeners have their own private notes, and then publish ideas on their sites as they start bringing ideas together.

There is some connection to Indie Web and the ideas of publishing on your own site first, as an antidote to the fickle algorithms of social media.

References

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

• "A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing."
• "Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.

[…] there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion. "

• "Gardens are a chance to question the established norms of a 'personal website', and make space for weirder, wilder experiments."

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks

• Gardens are...

a) Explorable, rather than structured as a strictly linear steam of posts. This is usually achieved through deeply interlinking notes where readers can navigate freely through the content.
b) Slowly grown over time, rather than creating “finished” work that you never touch again. You revise, update, and change your ideas as they develop, and ideally find a way to indicate the “done-ness” state to your reader.