Digital Gardens

What is a digital garden?:

A digital garden is basically a combination of an online notebook and a personal wikipedia. It’s your personal collection of ideas.

An exceptional source on the topic of digital gardening is A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. I agree almost with all of its points except the public nature of the gardening. I consider my digital garden to be a private thing from which I extract value and enjoyment.
Key aspects of digital gardening:

1. Topography over Timelines
   • Gardens are organized around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it’s connected to others.
2. Continuous Growth
   • Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
3. Imperfection & Learning
   • Gardens are imperfect by design. They don’t hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental
   • Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as your neighbour, but you’ll always end up with a different arrangement of plants.
5. Intercropping & Content Diversity
   • Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. While linear writing is an incredible medium that has served us well for a little over 5000 years, it is daft to pretend working in a single medium is a sufficient way to explore complex ideas.
6. Independent Ownership
   • Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.