Digital Gardening

#nebula

• A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes (or anything really) 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 can be changed over time, so they are not fixed like blog posts.

• They’re not following the conventions of the “personal blog,”. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

• Not only notes, gardens also include essays, videos, podcasts, images, but instead of being their own thing, they are interconnected with everything else.

Gardens vs Streams

• Streams – the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events.
• This is not inherently bad. Streams have their time and place. Twitter is a force-multiplier for exploratory thoughts and delightful encounters once you fall in with the right crowd and learn to play the game.
• But streams only surface the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time.
• The predominant form of the social web — LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research
• The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
• The Stream is a newer metaphor with old roots. We can think of the”event stream” of programming, the “lifestream” proposed by researchers in the 1990s. More recently, the term stream has been applied to the never ending parade of Twitter, news alerts, and Facebook feeds.
• In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
• It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments — exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.
• In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the Utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream.
• Your Stream becomes your context and your interface.
• We’re infatuated with the stream, infatuated with our own voice, with the argument we’re in, the point we’re trying to make, the people in our circle we’re talking to.
• And it’s about getting back to the idea that our Personal Learning Network isn’t just our twitter followers, but is an effort to connect work together not just people. And maybe to understand the process of connecting and building and extending the work of others is as human and engaging as the conversational Stream.

Campfires

• Campfires are conversational spaces to exchange ideas that aren’t yet fully formed.
• Slack, Discord, etc… communities

What exactly makes a website a digital garden as opposed to just another blog?

Topography over Timelines

Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it’s connected to others.

Gardens don’t consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren’t the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden.

One of the best ways to do this is through Bi-Directional Links  – links that make both the destination page and the source page visible to the reader.

Many entry points but no prescribed pathways

Continuous Growth

Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
https://res.cloudinary.com/dxj9qr5gj/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,q_auto:best,w_1000/v1621773885/maggieappleton.com/notes/garden-history/gardentime_rrsecv.png

Imperfect: against personal branding and seo optimised content

Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how “done” they are, and how much effort you’ve invested in them.

Independent from platforms

Resources

• The Garden and the Stream: A Techno pastoral by Mike Caulfield – the original source of the concept of Digital Gardening
• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks
• You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang
• What is a digital garden? by Chris Biscardi
• The Garden and the Stream: An IndieWeb Pop-up Session
• The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream by Will Stedden
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleto
• https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners?tab=readme-ov-file
• https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/
• https://egghead.io/lessons/egghead-sector-the-future-of-mdx-and-digital-gardens
• https://joelhooks.com/on-writing-more
• https://x.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1250532315459194880|twgr^7b03fe6dc7da8982b0cfb46a337702fed82a851d|twcon^s1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.technologyreview.com%2F2020%2F09%2F03%2F1007716%2Fdigital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet%2F