Digital Gardening

This note does not have a description yet.

  • The Internet Is Not Prosthetic

    The internet is not some other thing, separate from life, it is an abstraction that is very real.

  • Motivation for Taking Notes Comes from the Output

    What you intend to do with your notes is the thing that motivates you to take notes in the first place. The act of taking notes can be enough when getting started, there needs to be something more to keep going year after year.

  • Examples of Digital Gardens

    Examples of digital gardens I’ve come across:

  • Digital Gardening Is a Grander Vision of Zettelkasten

    Digital gardening is a superset of Zettelkasten principles applied to public content. The ethos of gardening is more free form and doesn’t emphasize the experience of the visitor. The reader of a digital garden would benefit from Zettelkasten principles such as atomicity (one concept or idea per note). Content in digital gardens should be structured at the leaf nodes for a more useful visitor experience.

  • The Garden and the Stream

    Streams are a metaphor for the majority of the Internet we interact with today characterized by time-ordered events that require context to understand.

  • Hyperfine Village Organizes Ideas Spatially

    I came across the idea of a hyperfine village from Lisa Hardy. It’s a novel way to organize your ideas into a metaphorical “village” so you can more easily recall them in context later. Rather than search or rote memory to recall an idea later, you can go for a stroll in your village.

  • Website Navigation Does Not Lend Itself to Discovery

    Modern websites rely on strict hierarchy of pages to help users navigate. This uses central pages to send users back to once they’ve completed reading an article. However, this rigidity does not optimize for serendipitous discovery and many important pages on a website can be inadvertently orphaned (either because it doesn’t fit neatly into a hierarchy or users don’t know to look for it).

  • An Epistemic Status Sets Expectations About Content

    A trait of digital gardening is to include metadata in a post to indicate how confident the author is in the post. This is a neat way of making space for half-finished ideas and works-in-progress.