On Digital Gardens

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between blogs and digital gardens.

A blog is chronological. Each post is meant to be finished, polished, and presented as a complete thought. You publish it and move on. There’s an implicit pressure to keep up — to post regularly, to have something to say.

A garden is different. Notes don’t have to be finished. They can be half-formed, speculative, exploratory. You can come back and tend to them months later. You can link between them, creating paths for yourself and others to wander.

I wrote about moss-and-memory the other day, and I think there’s a connection here. Moss doesn’t grow in straight lines either.

Principles

• Grow slowly. Better to have three notes you care about than thirty you don’t.
• Link freely. The connections are the point, not the timeline.
• Revise publicly. An updated date is fine. Notes don’t need to be frozen.
• Leave room. Not every link needs to resolve yet. Broken wikilinks are placeholders, not failures.

The wikilink to texture-studies in the moss note is broken — and that’s okay. It’s a promise I might keep later.