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Digital Gardens

Definitions

Image Source:
Image Source: Maggie Appleton
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A digital garden is a public website where you publish and link the notes from your learning. It is more organized and edited than private notes and less formal than a blog.
"A 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." —Maggie Appleton
"It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space." —Maggie Appleton
"The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there." —Joel Hooks

The History Of Digital Gardens

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Benefits Of Creating Digital Gardens

  • Relationship building. Have somewhere to link people when you have a piece of knowledge that would be valuable for others.
  • Collaborative. There is the ability for comments on specific sections. You can also invite others to be editors or easily create a page or mini-site under a unique domain.
  • Forcing function for learning depth. Knowing that others might see it forces a more thorough level of note-taking. It raises the bar to the level that someone with no other context would need to be able to understand the text.
  • Search engine optimization. Every page can be a source of perpetual traffic.
  • Gives you a long-term asset. As you learn everyday, it will quickly add up to thousands of pages. If all you do is share what you learn, that knowledge's value is very fleeting and become orphaned.
  • You don't have to spend lots of time figuring out how you're going to standout in the newsfeed. Instead, you can focus more on delivering information people might look for when searching Google.
  • Create something that matches your style and brand quickly. It's harder to build a unique visual brand on social media.
  • Own the content, domain, and traffic. On social media, over time your followers become less and less valuable.

Challenges With Digital Gardens

1. Takes a lot of time to set them up

  • You have to determine what tool to use, which takes time
  • Those tools have a learning curve
  • You have to determine what you will put online and how you will organize it
  • Create the habit and workflow of using it
  • Has to reach some threshold of posts to be valuable to others
  • Has to be valuable for awhile to start to get juice from Google
  • Picking the right platform to share on

2. There is an opportunity cost

  • With the time that you're taking to make the notes good enough to share publicly, you could spend that extra learning more or even taking your best ideas and making those blockbuster.
  • It can be a way to procrastinate on doubling down on your highest expected value work and going public with it.

3. There is a switching cost

  • New tools
  • New paradigm
  • New way of interacting with your audience

4. Has to be of value in order to get outside traffic

  • People need to link to it in or for your site to do well on search engines
  • Has to be worth linking to
  • Pressure to finish content and make it self-complete at each stage rather than allowing pages to be half-complete

5. There might be parts you don't want to be public

  • People need to link to it in or for your site to do well on search engines
  • The note-taking experience may be lessened because you can't share private notes within a public document.

Why Digital Gardens Should Exist In The World

Newsfeeds have won the web in many ways. We see them everywhere on the web:

  • Search results
  • Email and message inbox
  • Social media newsfeeds
  • Podcast apps
  • Blogs

Newsfeeds have a few common properties:

  • Includes a title, image, link, and/or description
  • Has an order determined by an algorithm that often includes some measure of chronology, quality, and engagement
  • Allow you to quickly sample the items in the feed by scrolling

Newsfeeds are powerful because:

  • They're addictive
  • It's easy to see what's new from a person you've subscribed

The downside of newsfeeds are:

  • The algorithms are typically designed to maximize ad revenue profit, not learning
  • They present information in a fragmented way
  • They don't evolve
  • They surface the most recent info, which leaves out the rest of history
  • They're fleeting
  • Owned by a large, centralized entity with the ability to censor you

Digital gardens, in many ways, are the opposite of newsfeeds:

  • Timeless
  • Accretive
  • Richly interconnected
  • Owned by you

Digital gardens and newsfeeds are complementary:

  • They go better together. Their weaknesses cancel each other out while their strengths multiply each other.
  • You can repurpose content. You can use the same content on the newsfeed and in your digital garden.
  • They can help you think from more angles. Writing for Twitter forces shortness. Writing for a newsfeed forces you to think about the packaging of your idea so it stands out. Writing for a digital garden helps you think through the idea more deeply.

Examples Of Digital Gardens & Case Studies

Links

I love the simplicity of Darren Lau's site. He is already collecting and sharing links in his newsletter. This site serves as a categorized repository of those links.

Short Posts

As soon as I saw Andy's site, I knew that I wanted one like it. Nothing quote matched what I was looking for. Notion is the closest that I found.

Mini Profile

This post from Anne-Laure is a great example of what you can do once you have done several mini profiles and you want to bundle them together in one thread.

Is A Digital Garden For You?

It likely is if you answer yes to most the bullets below:

  • You love learning
  • You see yourself learning for a long time
  • What you learn about has long-term value
  • You want to make more of your private notes public

How To Quick Create A Digital Garden That Looks Beautiful

I wrote an in-depth article on creating a digital garden here.

Related Concepts

Acknowledgements

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