Digital Garden

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) 🌱 A Digital Garden is the modern digital Zettelkasten that sits between a blog and a wiki and is published on the interweb "internet". In a digital garden posts are evergreen. Forever alive. Just add new thoughts to it and make it live. Or graft it onto another idea. Unlike a blog that is filled with rigor mortis after 1 week.

Sönke Ahrens is the primary reason you are reading about [[Zettelkasten]] and [[Digital Garden]]s today. He wrote the book "[[How to Take Smart Notes]]" in 2017 that started the snowball rolling for Digital Gardens. It processed Luhmann's difficult system of knowledge collection and wrote a manual for it so that many others could follow and understand it better using three steps. The [[Fleeting Note]], [[Literature Note]] and [[Permanent Note]].

A digital garden lives in three stages, seedling, budding and evergreen. Originally Fleeting Notes, Permanent Notes and Literature Notes By: Sönke Ahrens. They are written with tools like Obsidian, Notion or Anytype and published using static site generators "SSG's" like Astro.js Jekyll, Hugo or Eleventy "11ty". A digital garden allows you to learn in public "online" by allowing you to record half-baked ideas that, with hope, blossom into evergreens. I think my website uses seedling, blossom and fruit, but it amounts to the same concept.

Fleeting Notes (most temporary)

Quick captures of random thoughts Lifespan: hours to 1-2 days max Action: Process daily → either trash or convert to literature/permanent notes

Literature Notes (semi-permanent)

Notes from external sources (books, articles, etc.) Lifespan: until processed Action: Process daily → distill into permanent notes in your own words

Permanent Notes (forever)

Your original thoughts and connections Lifespan: indefinite Action: Refine daily, link to other permanent notes