This thought garden is my take on a digital garden, a concept introduced to me by Maggie Appleton via Jorge Arango's "Informed Life" podcast. In Maggie's essay, "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden" she discusses the differences between this writing style and a traditional blog. She writes,

'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."

Think more Wikipedia and less NYT.

I won't go into the history of digital gardening here. If you're interested, the essay I reference above does a great job investigating that. I will say I love to use hypertext and see the ways ideas interweave, and this quote about the early days of the internet speaks to my heart about how different The Web looked in its infancy:

The early web-adopters were caught up in the idea of The Web as a labyrinth-esque community landscape tended by

WikiGardeners and WikiGnomes. These creators wanted to enable pick-your-own-path experiences, while also providing enough signposts that people didn't feel lost in their new, strange medium.

I love imagining The World-Wide Web as this spider web of thoughts and ideas strung together in emergent and diverse ways. Unexpected and sometimes terrifying paths we must learn to navigate much like we learn to navigate in the real world. I've been using Obsidian for about a year now for my own personal knowledge management, and I absolutely love the graph view that shows how so many different topics I read and write about interconnect. The image below is one of my current vaults. It's quite small though since I just overhauled it. Jorge's new book is high on my reading list because I really want to learn better ways of organizing my notes, both in Obsidian and here.

#pkm #thoughtgardens #history #seed