A Digital Garden is an online space that combines elements of a notebook and a blog, where individuals cultivate and share their thoughts publicly. Unlike traditional blogs with articles that have a publication date and start decaying over time, digital gardens are evergreen, allowing gardeners to continuously edit and refine their notes. These spaces are characterized by bi-directional linking, connecting notes together to create a trail of ideas that readers can follow, promoting exploration based on interest rather than chronology. Digital gardens are lightweight platforms that prioritize the content itself, offering flexibility in design to reflect the owner’s thinking style and preferences. They can be built using various tools, from simple no-code platforms like Obsidian Publish or Notion to more customizable options like Jekyll or Gatsby for those with technical skills. Overall, digital gardens serve as personal collections of ideas, fostering creativity, knowledge sharing, and community interaction in a less performative and more collaborative online environment.
A [digital] 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.
Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.” Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet – MIT Technology Review
Some other Digital Gardens
| Name | Creator | About |
|---|---|---|
| Maggie Appleton | Maggie Appleton | Maggie makes visual essays about programming, design, and anthropology. |
| Fork My Brain | Nicole van der Hoeven | Programming, Obsidian, RPG Table-top gaming |
| Blue’s Flowerbed | Math, Japanese, CLI etc. | |
| Gilbert’s Digital Garden | Coding, Habits, etc. |
How to Digital Garden
On Digital Gardens And Plagiarism
By their very nature, digital gardens are a work in progress, and this site is no different. This is both the strength and weakness of digital gardens. On the strength side it means that the content is more immediate, spontaneous, and niche. But on the other side it means that it lacks polish, and part of polish is citing sources.
I hope that we can just take time to recognize that it takes time and effort to cite sources. By no means do I want to justify or minimize the harms of plagiarism. But this site, like many, if not most digital gardens, does not have an editorial staff (or any staff). There’s no large budget (or any). There is simply a tension here. It requires effort and rigor to cite every source, and it requires even more to do that on a digital garden.
What’s different about a digital garden? Because the intentions and expectations of a digital garden should be different from most other sites. See, at least part of my goal for this site is to collect and share. I collect things I have learned, as well as things that I am in the process of learning, and I want to share them with others. In doing so, I hope to empower other people to learn, and stimulate conversations that empower a community to learn together.
This is a very different approach than the majority of other websites on the internet. Most sites, including blogs, act in the role of content creator, or publisher. Sometimes they will alternate between those roles, but at any given moment they are acting as one or the other. But a digital gardener doesn’t fit neatly into either role. They are not so much a creator or publisher as they are a collector. On this site I collect thoughts. That’s what I do. I collect thoughts. Some of the thoughts that I collect are my own, some are from others. But the truth is, any thought, no matter how big or small was inspired by someone else’s thought. See Everything is a Remix.
The important thing is that we don’t erroneously claim credit for other people’s ideas and hard work. With that being said:
I promise to make a good faith effort to cite where I found these ideas, and even link to them. Inevitably, I will forget or miss some. If so, please message me and I will try to correct that.
The other important thing to understand is that since the intentions of a digital garden are different, then the expectations should be different as well. In particular, I want to point out that the social contract of a digital contract is and should be different. When I go to a blog or practically any website, it is understood that someone owns this site, and they also own all the ideas (i.e. intellectual property) on the site unless otherwise noted. But again, a digital garden is an ad hoc collection of thoughts from various sources. So I don’t think it’s a fair to presume that every piece of content is owned by the site owner unless otherwise noted. I can’t speak for every digital garden owner but I can say this about my site:
Just because any piece of content is on this site, does not mean that I claim it is my own original idea. In fact the assumption should be made that it is not my original idea, unless otherwise noted.
In particular, the parts of this site that are more “polished”, that are “my own” are: