What does it mean to have a digital garden?

To tend to it? To plant seeds? To grow those seedlings?

A friend of mine recently shared the idea of a digital garden with me, and it struck a note. He shared an article yesterday by Maggie Appleton who tracked the idea of a digital garden and laid out a set of principles for what it means today.

A couple of ideas that resonated include (in no particular order):

• A digital garden consists of various states of content seedlings, budding, and evergreen plants.
• Gardens are not organized linearly; digital gardens likewise better follow a topological linking of content vs a linear stream of content prioritized by date (think tagging system or dynamic, related linking of content).
• Letting readers know the state of the content (seedling, tree, etc.) is helpful for their journey through your garden.
• The concepts of a personal knowledge bank, learning in public, and publishing imperfect material are central to digital gardening -- gardens grow and change. Unlike older models of blogging where content was meticulously crafted and polished in isolation before publication, they are not incubated and then put on eternal, unchanging display.
• Personal blogging has evolved from sharing personal accounts diary-style to writing and sharing essays.
• A personal garden is a space where people can get to know you; keeping the garden tidy and the plants happy reflects who you are.
• Referring to posts' authoring dates as "planted" and updates as "last tended to."

I consider this blog the beginnings of my digital garden. My approach has been to take 5-20 minutes each morning to pick a topic, write my thoughts, and publish them. There is very little editing involved besides a spell check.

Each new post is its own seed. There are ideas, such as my post on money solving all problems, that can use much more development. It is a seedling -- confidently presenting it to a friend, a colleague, or a stranger and calling it a tree is out of alignment with its state. As I was writing it, I felt friction between my words and my intuition -- I could sense that my words did not capture my intuitive guidance, that there were many edge cases to cover, many holes in my argument, and many undefined terms and poorly scoped concepts.

I started this blog as both an exercise for my mind and the execution of a long-held dream to be a writer. The former is like going running in the morning or the gym; it is in service of strengthening the mind and showing me how disorganized my thinking is. It provides a space for my mind to play and explore without needing someone else to converse with. Writing this blog is the beginning of that long-held dream to be a writer -- I have always loved writing, exploring thoughts, and concepts. I am not a published author in the traditional sense, but planting seeds is the first step.

Back to digital gardening. I love this concept. I love the width and depth of the metaphor. There are so many different flowers, plants, and arrangements that can be put together with a digital garden. A portfolio of websites, interweaving of content, social media. It can be a bit overwhelming. Indeed it can also be a consuming practice that takes one out of the physical world -- remembering to tend our physical garden too keeps us grounded in evolutionary and ancestral reality.

I see the primary purposes of a digital garden as 1) a repository of personal knowledge, 2) a social mechanism to share parts of ourselves, 3) a place to expand one's intellectual mind. It is primarily a space for the mind and has potential for connecting with others.

Keep and maintain a digital garden, but do not get lost in it. Do not let it become a digital jungle that consumes you.