Digital Garden

Colloquially, a "Digital Garden" is a way of expressing ideas in public, as an alternative to a "blog". Thoughts and ideas can created, developed, refined, changed, and abandoned without strict depending on sequence, ordering, or constraints common to the typical blog. The Digital Garden may also be thought of as a wiki - a set of interconnected pages linking between each.

💡 See the Map of Contents for the set of topics and content on my own public digital garden.

Maggie Appleton describes a Digital Garden like so:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organized 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.

I became familiar with the term 'Digital Garden' once I began using Obsidian.md and learning how the model of linking notes that can be updated as needed was a model for PKM. See Using Obsidian for PKM for more information about the use cases, workflows, and the tools that support them.

💡 More of my tools, services, and media preferences can be found on Uses.

I also think of a "Digital Garden" is a metaphor for a method of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) that suggests continual engagement with past notes even as new notes are created - regardless of whether or not the collection of notes in the garden is public or only personally consumed. TIL (Today I learned) is my public digital garden.

💡 Read the what, why, and how of my digital garden on TIL (Today I learned)

Examples

In addition to TIL (Today I learned), there are other examples of digital gardens that I find interesting:

There are collective lists that can be seen here: