About Digital Gardens

What is a digital garden? It's a place where we watch things grow.

Why do I call the collection of posts on this site a digital garden rather than a blog? The short answer is this will be writing that I plan on updating and tending to, rather than just posting and archiving.

When I read Joel Hooks description on My blog is a digital garden, not a blog, I was hooked. He calls the digital garden "a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting 'showpiece'" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there." But he says so much more than that. It's a quick read, and I recommend it.

A garden is a place where things grow, and where others can even be invited to work. But gardens do need tending.

I am in something approximating awe of Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden. Everything about it is pleasing and engaging. I would especially recommend her deep dive into 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.

Maggie's list is super useful, and her digital gardening tools is impressively thorough.

Tom Critchlow write thoughtfully of this and other organizing metaphors in Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens

Chris Bisardi:

A Digital Garden is lowercase b blogging. It's writing without worrying about what people will think. It's writing in small, unfinished pieces and building them up to larger more edited pieces, in public. This is in contrast to big B blogging, which can be thought of as writing a 6k+ word thinkpiece or the authoritative work on topic X without shipping any smaller pieces.

"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," writes Mike Caulfield in perhaps the primordial piece on the concept. This can be contrasted with the stream :

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.

The bottom line is that this way of thinking about the items here will give me license to post writing that I'm still working on, which is fitting because I want to write about things I'm still working on.

Here are a few other links on the subject or describe projects undertaken in a related spirit.

• Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
• Andy Matuschak's Notes
• Chase McCoy on Digital Gardens

Lastly, I'll note that I recently have added something much more truly blog-like, where I just talk about updates I make to the site and test out a micro.blog integration..