Digital gardening promotes a collaborative and iterative approach to sharing knowledge on the web.
Digital gardening and social media platforms like Twitter serve different purposes and cater to different communication needs.
Deep dives
The concept of digital gardening
Digital gardening is the practice of changing the approach to publishing personal knowledge on the web. It involves shifting from a stream-based approach, where information is organized in a linear, time-based manner, to a garden-based approach, where ideas and knowledge are interlinked in an evolving network. The aim is to promote the sharing of half-baked ideas, small notes, and ongoing revisions, allowing for a more flexible and collaborative approach to creating and curating knowledge. Examples of digital gardens include Wikipedia, which embodies a collaborative effort to cultivate and update information over time.
Challenges with traditional blogging
Traditional blogging often follows a formal and finalizing approach, where blog posts are meticulously crafted, edited, and published as finished pieces. This approach puts pressure on writers to produce polished content, hiding the process and evolution of ideas. It also creates a barrier between the writer and the reader, as only the final version of the content is shared. This inhibits the sharing of incomplete or revisable ideas. Digital gardening, however, offers a more casual and iterative approach, encouraging writers to share half-baked thoughts, small notes, and engage in ongoing revisions and discussions.
Tools and platforms for digital gardening
While the current tools and platforms for digital gardening are predominantly designed for web developers or those with technical expertise, there is a need for more accessible options. Some existing tools include Obsidian, Roam Research, and LogSeq, which allow for personal note-taking and knowledge management. Notion is also recommended as a user-friendly tool that enables both private and public publishing. However, there is still a need for more user-friendly and customizable platforms to support digital gardening for non-technical individuals.
The relationship between digital gardening and social media
Digital gardening and social media, particularly platforms like Twitter, are seen as complementary rather than conflicting approaches to knowledge sharing. While social media platforms offer quick and informal exchanges, digital gardening provides a space for more thoughtful and curated exploration of ideas. Twitter allows for banter, casual conversation, and quick back-and-forth exchanges, while digital gardens encourage deeper thinking, revising of ideas, and building a body of knowledge over time. They serve different purposes and cater to different communication needs.
In this episode, Maggie and Ida get into the weeds of digital gardening. They talk about the history of the concept, what it means, the challenges of building digital gardens, the Cozy Web, the limitations we face with blogs and the web infrastructure that propels them, and whether digital gardening is complementary or one-against-the-other with Twitter.
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