your digital garden needs more links
digital gardens are collections of densely linked notes that evolve over time; you might expand on a note, copy or reference it, even prune it completely. maggie appleton will get you mostly caught up.
there are two overlapping use cases for digital gardens: publishing and learning. in the case of publishing, digital gardens offer an alternative to reverse-chronological navigation; in the case of learning, they offer a flexible, expansive approach to personal knowledge management.
more digital gardens are popping up online – yay! – but many of them (and the content created to teach about them) are missing one of the key elements and functions of digital gardens: the links.
one of the points of a digital garden is that it encourage curious exploration for both the writer and the reader; it inspires connections between disparate, evolving ideas that, hopefully, lead to unexpected discoveries and insights. there is no beginning or end; each link builds a new path through the garden, and you navigate those paths by clicking through them.
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think of the typical homepage for a website. you likely have a series of links in the navigation bar, links to some key pages within the homepage body, and maybe a feed of recently-published or most-read blog posts. there might be dozens of other pages and articles on that site, but you’re not likely to see them without effort.
likewise, consider the average notion, etc. template which might have many linked databases but likely overlooks links between like-items.
mark bernstein’s hypertext gardens (published in 1998 and worth clicking around) explains why this is so limiting:
- it forces nearly-arbitrary prioritization of your content. once an article is no longer considered “recent” or “most read”, it will stop receiving as much traffic.
- users will typically return to the home page, post feed page, or use other navigational tools like categories to move though content; this can create a premature sense of closure, discouraging them from exploring other material.
- there are fewer serendipitous discoveries; users will read one article that may or may not answer their question, and then they’ll leave.
this is true even if the “user” is you, and you’re just navigating and reviewing your own internal systems and data.
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links also live within and establish context. they tell you what a piece of information means within the confines of your system or website. a post (or note, etc.) is not just a post on its own, but an expansion, rebuttal, tangent to others.
mike caulfield, a key figure defining today’s digital gardening, refers to the old web as:
…a hyperlinked sense-making machine, one where we’d wander hyperlinked paths to slowly build context…
navigating from one thought to a related thought via hyperlink is a means of building context around a query or idea.
without links, our thoughts drift; too many drifting thoughts become noise.
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this isn’t a finger-wagging post; my blog isn't a garden (yet!) and i love that people are posting fun, weird stuff online regardless of how it’s formatted –
i’m just hungry for links!