What Is A Digital Garden? 🌱 Benefits & Philosophy - Obsidian PKM

hello my name is Callum also known as wuts and welcome to this video on the philosophy and benefits of digital gardening but what is a digital Garden a view a digital Garden as a complimentary publishing system to a blog or to social media this is a place for you to plant your own idea seeds and cultivate them over time into trees that eventually can produce fruit using the power of links notes and web pages this digital gardening analogy is very different than a Blog which is very linear and chronological in contrast a digital Garden is

much more nonlinear and it has what's called an emergent development you link notes over time and as you cultivate them as you build on them so your digital Garden grows digital Gardens can also drastically reduce the effort and the friction that goes in publishing content and Publishing ideas online this reduction in friction makes it a lot easier for you to focus on your writing rather than the publishing side of things in other words you don't need to use social media to publish your content and your writing to the Internet it's your own digital guardan online

in this video I'll touch on a few major benefits of using a digital Garden nonlinear writing which is a lot more how our brains think the three different components of a digital Garden which are seeds trees and fruits how you can build a system that's very low effort and low friction for publishing your writing so that you don't have to think about it too much it reduces perfectionism and reduces impostor syndrome and overthinking and finally I'll talk a bit more on how digital Gardens fit in with the rest of the internet if after watching this

video you're interested in in starting your own digital Garden I actually have a tutorial video that shows how you can use obsidian a notetaking app to automatically publish your content your writing online using the digital Garden plugin obsidian enables what's called a personal Knowledge Management System and you can selectively choose which notes you would like to make public and which notes you would like to keep private It's the Best of Both Worlds I've found that this digital Garden plugin is the easiest and the cheapest way to publish my ideas and my writing online while reducing

friction and not overthinking it like I tend to do with my blogs I wanted to quickly go over what exactly a digital Garden is and why I'm using this plugin so that you have some more context on how it all works if you're new to digital gardening I highly recommend checking out this article by meie Appleton at meet.com garden- history in this she goes through the ethos the philosophy of building a digital garden and why it is potentially not necessarily a replacement for a traditional blog system but an add-on for a traditional blog system I'm

going to show you how I use my own website wander loot.com which is a Blog website and a photography portfolio to complement my digital Garden so for example this is a long form blog that I just wrote on how post tokens can be used in web 3 to help writers monetize in a more sustainable manner so what I'm now going to be doing is rather than dealing with the long form blog which this one's quite long it's about 6,000 words and includes a ton of information I'm going to show you how to build a digital

Garden that's a lot simpler and smoother and has a lot less friction so as a great example here's a website called mental nodes this is by an lur Lum also known as nuran it's a really good example of showing how simple you can create your own digital Garden right away at the beginning of her digital Garden she has an explanation on what digital gardening is she talks about the different levels of it how you plant seeds which don't have to be written in a publishable form they can instead just be brief notes or concepts that

you think that you'll go back to later and over time as you revisit these Concepts the seeds grow into trees you take time to cultivate them to grow them into longer form writing potentially forming the basis of uh fruit fruit is new work they're more substantial essays videos potentially a book I think she actually just launched her first book so it clearly has worked for her and the idea is that rather than trying to take all of the time to focus on writing a very long and well researched article like I did with my last

newsletter entry you can instead write effortlessly write whatever comes to mind and then slowly cultivate it over time each of these notes is connected linked by what's called a bidirectional link a link that goes in both directions I can create a link between my notes in obsidian that allows me to reference one note to the next and tell each of those notes how they are connected this is in contrast to the way that we typically think about hyperlinking where I can tell where something came from but someone can't tell if I linked to their website

the power of using internal links bir directional linking in a digital Garden is that when I publish these notes using obsidian the bidirectional linking system is maintained on my website this means that when I share a note I can see that another note has linked to it which makes it a lot more easy and a lot more organic to move between the notes that I've written it helps with the wandering and the exploration element of my website this actually aligns with what the original intent of the internet was to allow people to explore to wander

the worldwide web without having to rely on a search or an algorithm but instead we can connect between different people between different ideas and move smoothly between the different elements of the digital Gardens uh as a helpful example you can see that blogs are timeline based when you publish a Blog it goes one after another whereas the digital Garden we're dealing with what's called topography based so this is dealing with linking between different notes or different public rather than trying to have a standalone article the goal is that you can have continuous growth something that

you cultivate slowly over time that has a lot less friction it helps you show people your work as you do it and then you can generate real-time feedback that hopefully will help inspire you to create the long form blog post that you can then publish as a classic blog so again the idea is to have a lower effort form of writing so that you can get into the habit of writing so that you can make this a part of your life and you can start sharing your value in public uh and then also use that

as the inspiration for your longer formed writing if you want to so an idea of this is that in modern society we tend to have this concept of perfectionism with everything and I think blog posts typically are highly edited so they take a lot of cultivated performance in order to publish a blog post closer to uh writing a book or a research paper and then on the flip side we have uh the chaos streams of social media where everyone just puts out whatever is on their mind stream of consciousness and it takes very very low

effort in order to put something out in between we have private notes which are things that don't get published and then we have between the chaos stream and the cultivated performance this concept of learning in public and that's really where digital Gardens sit so the idea again with digital Gardens is that you're able to just write how you feel and slowly build on it over time and then uh have an automatic publishing system that helps build this Garden you can create new paths you can plant new seeds you can cultivate new trees eventually you will

form the fruits that form the blog posts so what I'm trying to show you here is that we can take our private notes that we have written in obsidian and you can use the digital Garden plugin to form your own static website that displays a selected curation of your private notes so as I'll get into later it's very easy to select which notes you want to make public and which notes you don't so you don't ever have to worry about accidentally publishing one of your private notes that you would prefer remain hidden megie Appleton has

a few different different descriptions for her nodes kind of like Ann lur does with her mental nodes Mega appletons are seedlings which are for rough ideas early ideas perhaps just a concept that you want to expand on later as those seedlings receive attention and energy and time they bud and this is for work that's been cleaned up and clarified producing a budding and then over time it produces something Evergreen something that's fairly complete and in my opinion this is closer to a fruit in anord system or a blog post that I would probably be using

in my own system that I actually refer to as an alloy so for my own notes I have what I call an atom a molecule and an alloy and that's just me because I tend to think in terms of material properties uh because I studied material science engineering for my undergrad but if you like the biological analogy I would say use whatever works for you but the general concept is that there's going to be three different tiers for the digital Garden so another benefit of building a digital Garden using obsidian is that it operates in

markdown markdown is effectively as simple of a writing format as possible and it's completely interoperable with every system on the internet so what that means is that for example if you were building your digital Garden on X or on Twitter or on Facebook on Instagram well you'd be building on another platform's property and if they wanted to change the format and how it operates there's no way for you to just export all that data and then create your own website so building your own website and populating it with your own writing in an interoperable reliable

system that you own and control really gives you a lot of positive benefit for building your brand as a Creator or just in general ensuring the future proof ability of your own content that you're putting out there online this is referred to as selfs sovereignty and obsidian enables effectively a decentralization of operating with markdown files using the digital Garden plug-in because anyone is able to just connect their vault to the digital Garden plugin and produce permissionless their own website and just to give you a quick example on what this will look like I'll show you

my current obsidian graph so this is what it looks like I've got roughly 1500 notes that I've been working on over the last year and a bit and this shows the nonlinear nature of writing an obsidian all of these nodes all of the circles they all have information in them they're all an independent note the lines are called edges and they connect the nodes or the notes and I'm able to connect the dots between my thoughts or between my notes over time and this is really powerful because we tend to think that everything in life

has to be linear but in reality the way that our brain works is much more like this knowledge graph we make connections and associations between different concepts so if we instead of trying to write in a linear fashion like a blog post start to write in a nonlinear fashion like a digital Garden we can start to produce a lot more connected ideas that will build and grow over time so like you can see if I zoom in here these are all different independent notes that all have their own note contents so now my goal and

what I'll show you how to do in this tutorial is how you can take a subset of these notes or create your own Vault and publish to a website that displays a digital Garden that's a cleaner version of what this graph is again the overall concept here is that I want to help you reduce overthinking so that you can just publish your thoughts your ideas and get them out there this has the expectation that it's low effort low friction publishing so you don't ever have to worry about impostor syndrome or uh being concerned what other

people think about your writing because really this is just an extension of your own brain that's helping you host it online so that you can learn in public I hope that this overview of digital Gardens helps you to see the benefit and the value of having a note-taking system that allows you to connect the dots between your thoughts so that you can more easily follow your past trains of thought and also reducing the friction and the effort associated with publishing this content online so that other people can see it I personally have found using a

digital Garden to be one of the most fulfilling ways of publishing my ideas and my thoughts and knowledge because I don't have to rely on the whims of an algorithm or a search engine to show people what I want to show them instead I can cultivate my digital garden growing it over time and provide a place where people can wander through my knowledge Garden I've also found that by reducing the friction and the effort associated with publishing I can spend a lot more time focusing on the writing and the research and learning rather than figuring

out how I'm going to publish it and Which social media platform and which algorithm I should be catering to instead I know that I can just work on my notes offline in my obsidian digital garden and then selectively publish the notes that I want to online how if you want you can connect it to your own custom domain your own name like I did with my digital Garden at wanderloot doxyz if you're looking for an example on what a digital Garden can be feel free to check out mine at ws. XYZ and I update it

almost daily so every time you go back in you'll start seeing different things which again is one of the powers of using a digital Garden if you found this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking and subscribing as this is by far the best way for me to grow my YouTube channel which I'm very much working on so I appreciate any support that you can give me thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video for