What is a Digital Garden?
A ‘Digital Garden’ is a metaphor for a blog that structures articles in a non-linear way.
Each article in a garden is defined as a seedling, a budding, or an evergreen.
Usually,
🌱 seedlingsare very rough and early ideas🌿 buddingsare work that I’ve cleaned up and clarified🌲 evergreensare work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).1
Of course, the details depend on the gardener.
Difference between Digital Gardening and Blogging
Here’s a comparison table between Digital Gardens and Blogging (generated from Chat-GPT):
| Feature | Digital Garden | Blogging |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Non-linear, often using tree or graph structures | Linear, chronological posts |
| Purpose | Knowledge curation, idea development, personal learning | Sharing updates, stories, articles, opinions |
| Navigation | Topic-based, connected nodes | Date-based, sequential navigation |
| Content Style | In-depth, interconnected ideas | Individual articles or posts |
| Examples | Knowledge trees, Zettelkasten notes | News articles, personal diaries, professional blogs |
| Tools and Platforms | - GitHub Pages - Notion - Roam Research - Obsidian | - WordPress - Blogger - Medium |
Why Digital Garden?
I’d like to compare general blogging to retail, which exists to seek profit. Digital gardens, on the other hand, offer a different approach.
Escape from the Obsession with Fresh Ideas
Timestamps on articles in a blog can feel like expiration dates. They indicate how fresh a post is and, at the same time, act as a reminder for lazy managers like me of how long the blog has been abandoned.
On the other hand, gardeners pave the roads for guests using hyperlinks. They build their own doors and connect writings in their own way. These paths can guide visitors to a flower bed, an arboretum, or a storage room abundant with fruits, without encountering the unpleasant smells of fertilizer.
Retailers must discard products that have passed their expiration dates, even if they are not significantly different from those produced a few days later. However, the roots of seeds, trees, and sweetly scented flowers are always welcomed to grow, as they are members of the garden family.
Escape from the Obsession with Perfectionism
Considering writing as part of a plant’s growth cycle frees us from perfectionism.
Running a blog, it’s hard to ignore the rules of search engines, which impose categorizing articles, ensuring legibility for robots, and staying tuned to trends to align with their “sacred algorithm.” These dogmatic mediators grade web pages according to their laws and treat rebels as losers. It’s understandable that random customers judge websites by these grades because they are just tourists who have just gotten off cruises called Google, Bing, etc.
Nobody blames a tiny flower blooming inside the greenwoods. Even though the smell of manure may reek, it’s hard to imagine visitors booing the garden as a failure. The majority of their concerns are likely, “What kind of seeds have been planted?”, “How long have they been here?”, or “Can the seeds bear edible fruits?“.
The gift of managing evergreen blogs is not granted to everyone.
Fortunately, planting an apple seed left from dessert time is absolutely fine as long as we have space for it.
In other words, defining ourselves as gardeners liberates us from the system of digital capitalism.
References
- https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
- https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
- https://jzhao.xyz/posts/networked-thought#what-is-digital-gardening
- https://chias.blog/2022/there-is-an-internet-that-is-mine/