Welcome!

The main purpose of this digital garden/thought landscape is to have a space where I can process and share my thoughts up until the unforeseen future. It’s not a place for short term ideas that need to go viral but a place where I can grow roots both online and offline. Instead of puttering around and foraging aimlessly, I am going to build the foundations of a cozy nook that I can call my own and hopefully the future generations can discover. [How I can turn this into a physical artifact is a different problem.]

I’m also thinking about how to connect both analog and digital practices of gardening so I have a physical representation of my practice online. We have moved to a new home and I’ve been wanting to grow an ‣ again.

Currently: Physical garden

What is a Digital Garden?

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.

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Digital gardening isn’t weeding or pruning. It’s the other side of the coin of the streaming/algorithm led connections we are now often exposed to thanks to social media. If we go back to the analogy of the world wide web, the digital garden represents the strands weaving into each other. It’s adding more context to the information we’re consuming and improving our content diet.

Campfires - mostly blogging for me, though I know some folks gather around private slack groups too. My blog functions as a digital campfire (or a series of campfires) that are slower burn but fade relatively quickly over the timeframe of years. Connection forming, thinking out loud, self referencing and connection forming. This builds muscle, helps me articulate my thinking and is the connective tissue between ideas, people and more. While I’m not a daily blogger I’ve been blogging on and off for 10+ years.

https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/

There are different stages of how my ideas germinate, sadly my current attention span and bandwidth don’t get me to the highest desired level

1. This is the pre-idea phase, where I see something that inspires me whether it’s a post, quote, or any kind of artifact/input coming from other people/places. I usually capture this in different places but mostly in my ‣
2. When an idea comes along, I add it in my ‣ page, which consists of ideas culled/inspired by the outside world. This is the place where my ideas marinate
3. If an idea is revisited, it can be drafted into something else or connected into different axons. This is the place of “mid” publishing where I put it out on a chaotic manner
4. Curation part - where I combine ‣ with ‣ by peppering small ideas but not necessarily making a bigger article or body of work out of this
5. If an idea gets me to move to write a longer piece or publish a small product, then it stays here. It gives me a small stake in the interwebs. There is also a sub stage somewhere between levels 3 and 4 but it’s more of effort related and a reflection of my skill and taste gap (‣)
6. This is the holy grail that I haven’t met. It’s me being published by a different source. A performative validation of my ideas by the public and the powers that be.