If people want to know what’s the difference between digital gardening and blogging, I’ll just direct them to this quote from the blog post, Stop giving af and start writing more by Joel Hooks:

The idea of a “blog” needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.

I started blogging in the early 2000s, back when “weblogs” are not about marketing thyself but about recording your life, your quirky thoughts and weird hobbies.

Now, marketing has invaded blogging, that’s all you see, and I hated what blogging has become.

Last year or so, I discovered digital gardening, and it’s like having a light bulb go off in a path shrouded by mists. I’ve had this idea to write on the web this way, but I just didn’t know what to call it. Once I got a solidified concept, I grew extremely excited!

I wrote being an imperfect digital gardener, about daring to put out grammar-addled, spelling-imperfect, half formed thoughts into the void of the Internet. I wrote about the joy of putting the idea “branding myself” to rest, and finally writing without dancing to the algorithm, not caring about SEO-fying my posts, just sharing my wild garden of thoughts and ideas to the world.

So, my thoughts about how digital gardens differ from blogs:

Blogs are chronological, often are “niched’ to align to a polished image you want to present to the world, and is about marketing the personality behind the writer. Blogs are tools to show you in the best light; a personal branding tool. Blog posts the most polished and complete version of your thoughts you want to show to the world. The posts that give people the best impression of you. Yet, they are ephemeral and rush past you like leaves on a fast-flowing river. Older posts are often buried and ignored.

Digital gardens are not chronological, the topics are often not confined to a topic but are a wild mix. The real star of the show is the knowledge being tended in the digital garden. Personal branding is more of an afterglow of the digital garden, a side effect rather than the sole purpose of a digital garden. Digital garden content are often incomplete, works-in-progress, not always polished or even well-written. However, they are like flowers in a garden, inviting you to linger and explore more through a series of posts, links and connections. Older content are resurfaced in newer essays and linked to newer ones. As a result, one can easily get lost in a rabbit hole of thoughts, exploring curiosities in unexpected ways.

Where to build your garden

Just recently, I decided to do the wild thing (at least by digital garden standards) to build my digital garden on wordpress.com. Many digital gardeners like to build theirs on static websites because they want to be free of the chronological format imposed by most blog content management systems, but I’m of the ilk who prefer not to spend endless hours building CMSes when there’s a perfectly good one I’m using.

But will there be a chance I move this website to a static website one day? I have no doubt, but the enterprise will be a humongous one.