There has been a fair amount of buzz around Automattic’s acquisition of the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin. There are also a good number of tutorials on how to install, activate, and set up the plugin. But I haven’t seen a lot about why you would want your blog to be part of the “fediverse”, or…
To me maintenance feels like a chore. It’s something you have to do, but it detracts from all the things you could be doing. But there’s another way of looking at maintenance. You are keeping something alive. In this sense you aren’t simply maintaining. You are gardening. The Garden and Desire A garden is a…
The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work. But the text that…
Tom Critchlow contrasts a “digital garden” against other online information sources such as Twitter. The garden is a public collection of notes, ideas, and musings. You can come back to it time and time again and each time learn something new. Twitter is more like a stream, always moving. And, as the old proverb goes,…
In 1993 Mark Bernstein proposed the metaphor “information farming” as a way to cultivate and share knowledge withing organizations. The farming metaphor stood in contrast to the ideas of information mining (extraction) and information manufacturing (stockpiling) because it emphasised cooperation and community. The idea is that knowledge workers would collaborate on data, refine it, and…
Garden of Infinite Possibilities Jorge Luis Borges’ story the “Garden of Forking Paths” is set in an elaborate garden, but the real garden is a book that is structured in such a way as to allow infinite possibilities. The connection between the metaphor of a garden and an early form of hypertext is uncanny. It…
