Digital Garden Concept
A digital garden to me is a way to subvert the traditional chronological feed of a blog into a way to really sit with ideas over time. As my understanding of a topic deepens or changes, that page for an idea may get updated itself. Many ideas are also timeless; if I write a piece in Jan 2018, it may look out of date where it is relevant today.
Key Features
- Non-linear exploration: Unlike blogs, gardens aren’t meant to be read in order. They’re designed for exploration.
- Growth stages: Notes can be seedlings (early ideas), growing (developing thoughts), or evergreen (mature concepts).
- Interconnected: Notes connect to each other through bidirectional-links creating a web of knowledge.
- Living documents: Notes are continuously refined and expanded over time.
Tools for Digital Gardening
There are many tools for creating digital gardens, including:
- note-taking-systems
- Obsidian
- Roam Research
- TiddlyWiki
- And now, Hugo!
Benefits
Digital gardens offer several benefits for your personal-knowledge-management:
- Encourages incremental thinking
- Creates unexpected connections between ideas
- Reduces the pressure to publish “finished” thoughts
- Builds a valuable resource that grows in value over time