open this note in the tree

notes on digital gardens

a digital garden is not a blog.

a blog is chronological and finished. you write the thing, post it, and it joins the queue going backwards in time. nobody reads post #14 of 80, ever. the implicit promise of a blog is "i had a fully formed thought; here it is."

a digital garden is topical and alive. notes have stages — seedling (an idea i'm sketching), budding (taking shape), evergreen (i'll defend this). they get edited. they link to each other. the home page shows you what's growing, not what's most recent.

the move that makes it a garden, not a wiki: it's personal. a wiki tries to be the authoritative source. a garden is one person's evolving understanding, shown in public, with all the half-thought-through bits visible.

things i'm trying to honor here: