Bookmark: "Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains"

Sebastian Greger

Bookmarked:

Chris Aldrich provides a thorough run-down of various traditions of Commonplace Books and Zettelkästen, a valuable collection on the history of such concepts. It is extended by a view on the recent emergence of “Digital Gardens”.

In the end, he sketches out a vision that is very close to my own: a combination of both the unstructured flow of atomic notes and the more curated publishing of their distilled essence:

Still missing from the overall personal knowledge and note taking space is a more tightly integrated version of both a garden and a stream (in Mike Caulfield’s excellent framing) that easily allows interaction between the two arenas. Some of the more blog-based sites with notes, bookmarks, articles and IndieWeb friendly building blocks like Webmention, feeds (RSS, JSON Feed, h-feed), Micropub, and Microsub integrations may come the closest to this ideal.

I'm Sebastian, Sociologist and Interaction Designer. This journal is mostly about bringing toge­ther social science and design for inclusive, privacy-focused, and sustainable "human-first" digital strategies. I also tend to a "digital garden" with carefully curated resources.

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