🌱 What is a Digital Garden?
A Digital Garden is … #
- A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.
- Digital gardens are tended to and evolve over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they get trimmed back.
- A digital garden embodies the nature of working in public and learning out loud: Sharing your current understanding and allowing others to learn from it.
- Like entangled roots and interwoven vines, the individual plants of digital gardens form a latticework of bi-directionally linked content that supports and encourages bridging and pollination to further understanding.
Where is this term from? #
Maggie Appleton found the earliest use of the term, which harkens back to the old school web: Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
It is similar to a commonplace book, another popular term on the IndieWeb. A Zettlekasten comes to mind, too.
Essays Worth Reading #
- Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom Critchlow
- My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks
- The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield
- How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
- You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff