We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ deas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss and build.
So glad I could make it to this IndieWeb popup! Interesting to hear other viewpoints and talk things through.
Value of Digital Gardening
Alasdair posed an interesting question: what has digital gardening brought you?
He shared that writing in public makes his thinking more coherent, and pushes him to think better. I totally agree. Trying to explain what struck me about an article to think it was worth saving, or what I want my future self to get out of it as I decide on tags and categories, adds a layer to my reading, and probably helps me remember the idea better.
I’ve also noticed a change in what I decide to read — I feel like I can tell earlier in an article that it’s not going to be anything that will spark a new thought, when I’m just reading something to reinforce what I already think and make myself feel good. I’ve tweaked the blogs and newsletters I follow over the past year to adjust the input coming in, which determines what I’m likely to read or not. I’m trying to be more honest with myself about what I want to read versus feel like I should read (looking at you, all those articles I send to my Pocket purgatory). Lately I’ve been reflecting on the volume of other material I consume versus what I create, but I’ll save that thread for its own post.
What Comes After Notes?
Ha, I wasn’t expecting to facilitate a session but I thought it was a fruitful conversation! I proposed this topic somewhat selfishly as I’ve noticed a drop-off in my writing longer articles synthesizing many articles since starting this digital garden. I think it’s valuable to add some initial thinking and reflection when I bookmark an article or finish reading a book, but haven’t yet figured out a process for revisiting recent notes to find connections and turn that into longer or more complex thought.
Someone suggested looking for themes once you’ve amassed a bunch of notes. Maybe that could be part of a personal quarterly or annual review process?
Decision points for a digital garden:
- Is it more helpful to refine one document on a particular subject (“living notes”), or add a new article each time you revisit the subject / idea? When is it valuable to save your progression of thought and learning?
- How to indicate the level of thinking (e.g. seedling vs. evergreen)?
A mention of “old growth” struck me, I think not quite in its original context, but in thinking about the rich complexity of an end-stage ecosystem, all parts interconnected and interdependent. It would take quite a while (and a lot of tending) for a digital garden to reach that level. I envision the trees as the pillars of thought and ideology that have been refined and cemented through much thought and research. Sometimes gaps open up in the forest, paradigm-altering ideas wiping swaths back to earlier stages of succession and growth. Old growth feels apropos as a metaphor for a healthy, mature digital garden.
Note to self: mind garden is the first term I came across for this type of note-taking, but perhaps in the way I use this site, it would be more accurate to think of it as a commonplace book?
Someone pointed out that repeating yourself is inevitable — and that it’s helpful. I like the thought of returning again and again to ideas to see how our thinking has evolved. The question is, how? What’s the process?
Chris shared a pattern he often uses at the initial stages of note-taking, starting with quick note-taking in a private or semi-private format, then after a bit of time polishing it and refining it into a public post.
For future thought:
- How to manage the volume of material we amass in an ever expanding digital garden or commonplace book?
- Is old information still relevant and worth maintaining? What’s the process for cleaning out outdated information, or noting older stages of thought that you might no longer agree with?
A Network of Digital Gardens
Angelo shared a kernel to start this session: what if you could create personalized search engines based on the websites of people you know (and potentially one or two levels further out)? Rather than searching the whole web, you could search the knowledge of your (extended) network, getting their takes rather than some rando’s who turns up in a Google search 😉 Potentially, you could also use someone else’s search engine who you trusted.
Actual human connection seemed key to this type of personalized search. Google is too big to be useful for much information. A memex of the world’s knowledge — an Encyclopedia Galactica if you will — is not actually that useful in itself. Context and localization and trust adds real value — and that’s probably not something Google will ever be able to incorporate. (Things like, did this person actually read this book they reviewed? Did they actually go to the restaurant they recommended?) Maybe that’s what they eventually envisioned doing with their dead social network…? Google relies on watching your habits but it doesn’t understand why you’re looking for what you’re looking for. You might be looking for a gift for a friend, doing research for a project, trying to learn other perspectives — they filter all data through the lens of capitalism and how they can sell you more things. That’s no replacement for human connection, or expertise a person has that could help you leap to things you didn’t know to look for.
There are benefits to searching someone’s website over following their feed, especially for a digital garden / commonplace book that has a huge range and volume of information that may not be useful as it comes — but would be useful when you need it.
8 replies on “Gardens and Streams II: Notes and Thoughts”
This Article was mentioned on boffosocko.com
★ Liked https://tracydurnell.com/2021/09/26/gardens-and-streams-ii/
I’ve missed the latest IndieWeb popup gathering on digital gardens and streams (thanks Frank for bringing that up). Thankfully, they are intricate note-takers, and it always pays off to poke around in those. As avid journaler, the subject naturally appeals to me. In fact, you could say that Brain Baking is my digital garden. Or is it?
First, what’s a digital garden? Simply put, it is your (1) personal (2) online space to (3) write down notes and (4) connect them—as Dennis Seidel defined it in his garden. Those four things are important:
Personal: These are your own private thoughts. But are they private? Once the community starts discussing digital gardens, they tend to want to share them. The rise of Roam and Obsidian made it easy to (self-)publish these, but even before that, people have been setting up wikis and blogs for the very same reason.
Online: It’s called a digital garden for a reason.
Write down notes: the collecting part.
Connect notes: the value-creating part.
Collecting thoughts isn’t exactly new. Cicero did it, Michelangelo did it, John Locke did it, Charles Darwin did it. Their methods do not differ much from modern digital gardeners. Or do they? Which of the above four things is essential? Only the last two are: find a way to write down your thoughts and go through them and manage to create novel insights.
Why digital is overrated
Whether they are codexes, memexes, or genexes: it all boils down to store knowledge outside of your brain and (regularly) reprocess them. I dare to say that technology, such as the World Wide Web that features linked documents, aren’t all that compelling. I just as easily reference to other pages and books on the analog notes I write down. Sure, refactor and move tools greatly simplify structure, and digital text is easily searchable. But for every
[[linked]]article you produce, clutter is introduced that is called syntax. Furthermore, a lot of people struggle with actually tending to the garden: cutting branches, moving plants. The end result is usually a mess.One of the biggest disadvantages of digital gardens, to me, is exactly the fact that it’s structured. That is, articles—whether they are blog posts or wiki pages do not matter—are still mainly text-based. You can’t quickly draw rectangles or arrows next to your notes. You can’t draw an eukaryote and point to its nucleus to explain that that’s where the DNA chromosome strings are coiled up (sorry, I’ve been doing some yeast cell research). You can’t print photos or cut out parts from newspapers to paste it besides a schematic. You can’t grab your watercolor paint and brighten up a page. You can’t paste your cat’s whisker in your notebook (for research purposes, of course!). You can’t smear out a blueberry or wet tea leaf to try and capture its smell and color.
Another advantage that tends to be dismissed is (s)low tech: off-screen time. I already spend way too much time clutched behind a PC. I prefer to go through my notes on a bench in the park without the artificial light of an LCD screen. Speaking about benches: capturing fleeting thoughts only works if you hold on to your writing tools at all times. I hope you leave your technological trinkets outside the bedroom, but I suspect few of us do.
I’ve been using a combination of Sublime Text and Obsidian extensively for my PhD research, so don’t get me wrong, I love digital editors and connectors. But compared to my fountain pen and my notebook, they severely hamper my thoughts. Of course, to get anything published, whether it is an academic paper or a blog article, you’ll need to convert your thoughts to ASCII.
I do not refactor my analog notes. That’s impossible unless you bring out the scissors. Instead, I rewrite things, cross things through, and reference to both previous pages and previous books a lot. To do that, I digitize and annotate my journal pages. So digital does help to archive, but it is far from the best way to assist my thinking.
Why public is overrated
Public digital gardens are overrated. They are very hard to navigate. Time and time again, I get lost in the jungle of mystical links, in the check-ins drowned in the bookmarks and the quotes. Fancy IndieWeb sites that boast 5 separate RSS feeds to “help” navigate the labyrinth do not make it better. I’ve tried following multiple interesting people that pump loads and loads of seemingly cool looking stuff into their site. It always ends in confusion. Yes, sometimes I discover a link to another published article (external to the garden, by the way!) that is interesting. As admiring as the garden is, the things they grow there are almost always puzzling.
But the most important reason why I think they’re not that useful to others, is exactly that: they’re personal. That is, you’ll have to make the translation between their context and your context. And that always and inevitably means important messages get lost in translation. It’s fun to fool around in someone’s garden, but if you have no clue what to do with tropical seeds in your own temperate climate powered garden, then don’t bother.
Many famous journals were never meant to be published and have to be heavily edited to produce an interesting coherent text. Hilarious letters from Madame de Sévigné or depressing ones from Vincent van Gogh are the exception, since they were written to be read by others, although not the general public.
Digital Gardens or Blogs?
That is why I think that most digital gardens are not blogs. Again, there are exceptions, like some articles in Tracy Durnell’s, but on average, digital gardens contain slices of context-heavy information processed by someone else’s mind. Only after the translation into something publishable, like a blog post, they become interesting for others to read. I have little use for countless of “collected” links and likes. Published Obisidan Vaults look cool, but the initial excitement wears off pretty quickly.
Cory Doctorow has been calling his blog his Outboard Brain since 2002. Outboard brain, not Second brain. He must have had notes—either in his head, on paper, or digitally—before being able to put the message out there. Quite a few people reach for WordPress to build their digital garden nowadays, and although WordPress is the de facto blogging tool, the result is all but a blog.
I much prefer others’ blogs, in the classic sense of the word (let’s ignore parasitic corporate blogs). These are interesting because they are coherent—or at least, should be. They are about others’ passion for whatever that drives them. Which might spike my own interest. And then, perhaps, maybe, could end up in my own notebook.
With the help of a pen, of course.
tags icon
obsidian
blogging
Bookmarked Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why we need more Boutique… — Mirror (sariazout.mirror.xyz)
I hadn’t encountered the idea of boutique search engines before the past few weeks, then I heard about IndieWeb Search and my friend sent me another small site search engine, and I realized that there are small versions of them out there that I use, which could be awesome to aggregate.
What I find myself wanting a lot is a search engine for my music — I have lyrics stuck in my head, I can hear the song, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what song it is. Google and DuckDuckGo do pathetically at lyrics in my experience — useful if you listen to pop music but nothing more obscure. Sometimes you can get there if you keep subtracting the names of more popular artists. I have a known pool of music that I listen to — I scrobble everything on Last.fm — so what I want is to search the lyrics of songs in my library. Another form of the personalized search engine we talked about a little during the session Angelo led at the Gardens and Streams discussion.
I can also see value in hyperlocal search. Local wikis have kinda filled that niche in the past — I remember Davis had a wiki that my friend who went to UC Davis was really into (warms my heart to see it appears to still be alive!). Back in 2008 I tried to start a zero waste food wiki for the Seattle area to collect info on where you could buy certain items in bulk, but gave up on it when a big name in the zero waste world announced she was making an app that would do the same thing. (I suspect a fair number of apps are essentially boutique search engines for their own limited data set, hadn’t thought about it that way before 🤔)
The pretty boutique listing / search I’ve used regularly is Atlas Obscura whenever I’m going on a trip, trying to find some eclectic and off the beaten path destinations and activities. Some places have a wide array of fun places to go, others not so much 🤷♀️
If I had a wishlist for boutique searches, I want a curated search of handmade and local artisans and craftspeople. Even not local only would still be great (though it’s sad when you find something amazing and realize it’s made in Australia and will cost $30 to ship). The “shopping” function of the big search engines is depressing. Now that Etsy allows people to resell shit from China it’s not a great way to find actually handmade things. Also, not to diss on Latvia but every other item on Etsy seems to be from there, and trying to shop more sustainably I don’t want to ship that many items from overseas. I use Etsy’s vintage search a fair bit for secondhand items, but now everything before like 2000 is considered vintage so there’s a lot of shit in there too. The closest thing I’ve found is Made Trade‘s marketplace for ethically-made goods, though I was not thrilled to order a bath mat and have it drop shipped from Egypt lol. I want a search engine that aggregates those different sources I have to go to individually now, so I can search Made Trade, Etsy vintage, Craigslist, artists’ collectives like Join Design, participants in craft shows like Urban Craft Uprising, local boutique businesses like Prism and Buy Olympia, and the listings of local salvage and consignment stores all at the same time without having to switch between them all and repeat the search or look manually. Individual businesses and craftspeople opting in to search would have to be vetted to make sure they weren’t just resellers of cheap manufactured junk, otherwise it would devolve into a crap Etsy again.
I love having my own website.
I’ve been thinking it a lot lately and over the past year or so as I’ve gotten into the IndieWeb. It dawned on me recently, as I kanban away my tasks to do, that I basically never need to add tasks on my website to my to-do list, because that’s what I do for fun. I don’t need a reminder, because I look forward to it — it’s more that I have to be careful not to get sucked into website stuff when I need to be doing other things 😂 (Here I am, after my evening screen cutoff time, blogging away… *whistles innocently and ignores the clock*)
The more I use my own website, the more I realize I can use it for. I loved this mind garden as soon as I started it, and at this point can’t picture not having it. As I started tracking my reads, it dawned on me that my own website was a better place to log my annual reading than Goodreads, and would give me a lot more control over what I paid attention to. I’m testing out tracking my TBR list on here too, though I haven’t quite gotten it pinned down yet. That’s fine, this is mine, so I can experiment as much as I want! I decided I miss other people having blogrolls, so I set one up. Right now I’m tracking my NaNoWriMo progress here instead of on the NaNo website, and it’s been a fun change from the official site’s focus on word count to reflecting on each day’s experience. I appreciate that the IndieWeb community is pulling me further down this route and helping me think bigger about what a website can be.
Replied to The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex (Adobe 99U)
I think Blanda has diagnosed a real problem — that the creative world and productivity field suffer from regurgitation of the same ideas and a lack of original thought — but doesn’t consider the cause and misses the solution.
Creatives aren’t shy about saying their work pays poorly and people shouldn’t follow in their footsteps — yet they make money teaching others their craft. I think a lot of these ‘bullshitters’ Blanda calls out recognize that training and writing about productivity and work practices is more likely to earn them money than their creative work — but as Blanda points out, don’t have much new to add to the conversation yet.
At the same time, I believe sharing what you’re learning is valuable (I’ve been doing it since 2012, and took my own hack at synthesizing everything I’d learned so far into my Craft Your Life planner) — the act of writing what you think or what you’ve learned helps reinforce that. But, your writing may be more useful for yourself than others, especially when you’re starting out. And, let’s be honest, it takes quite a bit of writing to find your own voice and level up.
So the issue Blanda’s describing is people trying to shortcut their way up their career faster by borrowing ideas and repackaging them without adding anything of their own. But they compound that lack by using generic, overused sources instead of hunting down fresh examples.
Where we get our information and our inspiration matters: deep, firsthand, and sensory are the most valuable sources — and these are tough to get from the Internet. When we only read things we find on social media and newsletters, we’re reading the same stuff as everyone else. Yes, that keeps us in touch with the Cultural Conversation and zeitgeist, but that’s a difficult space to say anything original. What you’re taking in shapes what you’re putting out.
The quality of information improves the closer you get to the source. First person accounts and physical evidence are our best sources of information about history. Analysis of original sources by experts in the field comes next. In the creative world, the experience of creating your own work or interviewing other people is the closest you’ll get.
Engaging more of your senses roots the experience or knowledge deeper. Visiting a museum, exploring a new place, or taking a hands-on workshop yourself will be a richer experience and source of inspiration than watching someone else do it on YouTube. (This is something the pandemic has stolen from me — I used to take “artist dates” (an idea from The Artist’s Way) by myself to some cool activity or place, but as a higher risk person I’m wary of going anywhere a lot of other people will be — like this weekend I’m skipping the rhododendron gardens at peak bloom — they’ll have to wait till next year 😢)
(I’m blurring together writing and visual art and productivity advice to some extent here but 🤷♀️ this is an off the cuff response and I do think a lot of the concepts apply across creative fields.)
Another challenge of primarily getting our info from the Internet is its obsession with what’s new. The lifespan of a work online is typically short-lived. Yet the article I’m referencing here is six years old. I missed whatever the contemporary response was, but I don’t think that invalidates considering the argument today — it’s certainly triggered me to put words to some thoughts I’ve had swimming for a while. The immediacy of a Twitter hot take should be outdone by a more complex exploration that takes longer to prepare.
The Internet serves up quantity, but going deep takes more work. Reading one artist’s art book will teach you more than skimming your Instagram feed with art from fifty different artists. There’s endless 101 level content out there, but it’s harder to find the 400 level thinking. Online, academics are great for analysis and deep cuts into their field. Books and longform have space to carry thoughts longer, and have (hopefully) put more thought into their conclusions than a tweet chain or blog post.
Likewise, drawing creative inspiration only from social media and online sources can be limiting, depending on where you’re getting the info from. The algorithm excels at showing you more of the same thing you already like, and reinforcing what you already think. Instead of using aggregator websites, following interesting people who are making their own work or digging into different realms of the web helps you explore off the beaten path and can broaden your attention to sources and ideas you might not have encountered on your own. (Earlier this year I flushed out my RSS feeds and have been working on following more individuals, though I haven’t added them to my blogroll yet 😅) Mix up the demographics of who you’re following. Guide yourself down your own paths by following backlinks, exploring archives, and digging deeper into new concepts. The more serendipity we can expose ourselves to, the better.
Beyond being a place to connect with others, I see the Internet as a wide shallows to wander and find sparks to pursue. But instead of stopping with that spark, we can delve deeper with books and tactile experiences. We can take a dip back into the Internet for more when that well has run dry.
I’ve had the past week off work. I was inspired by what Ray shared about his experience stepping back from the Internet for a bit, and decided to try a lite version 😉. Though I haven’t done a hard Internet cutoff, I’ve stopped the accumulation of new things to read: I haven’t been checking my feeds, micro.blog, or Twitter, and instead working my way through the tabs I already had open. I’ve taken several days totally off from Internet reading. I unsubscribed from a few more email newsletters.
And I haven’t felt like I’ve been missing out. I do miss the dopamine hit of new things to read — I’ve described myself as a neophile in the past — but I suspect the amount of time I spend reading other people’s work has been giving me a mental excuse not to pull that info together into something more. I feed my brain with intellectual junk food because organizing my own thoughts is more effort. But, ideas you never process or do anything with aren’t actually valuable. This week I’ve felt more inspired to write my own work than I have in ages — I’ve started half a dozen blog posts. Part of that comes from having a break from my day job, for sure, but I’d also credit giving myself a break from taking in more new info and instead giving that brainspace to processing. (More sleep doesn’t hurt either ���)
In the fiction writing world there’s the trope of the author who puts all their energy into world building and runs out of steam before they can write the book. I think we can all fall into this mindset on the internet: it’s so easy to keep reading the next thing and the next, to glut ourselves on ideas and never do anything with them. I’m going to keep trying this for the next week off and see how I feel after more time away. I’m hoping I can persevere against the urge to binge read for a while 😂
Article via Tom Critchlow
We discussed syndicating notes from your website to Twitter at yesterday’s Homebrew Website Club in light of the upcoming Twitter ownership transfer, as a way to demonstrate existing POSSE technology and encourage more people to adopt IndieWeb approaches. I expressed that I struggle with *whether* I want to do this rather than *how*. What seems like it should be a simple step — posting to Twitter from my website — reveals itself as a complex decision rooted in how I want to present myself online.
Tl;dr: having one place to host all my content is simplest, but means being ok with uniting all aspects of my identity.
What I’m doing now
Dividing my writing across four platforms
I consider each platform to have a distinct purpose, so I silo where information belongs in my mind,* even when I own the silos.
* I also have this struggle with notebooks, and can’t write the wrong info in the wrong notebook. It’s a problem 😂
The platforms where I post now and their purpose
I started my blog Cascadia Inspired in 2011 as a way to help me adopt the Pacific Northwest as my home, and over the years my focus has shifted to creative work. My blog hosts long-form articles, photo collections, and personal accountability — in short, anything about making things.
articles about creative work
personal accountability
nature photos and excursions / trip reports
In 2020, I transformed tracydurnell.com from a dead portfolio website to a digital garden, a place to save information and start to think about it, without having high expectations of myself for producing high quality writing or original insights. My intention for this site, up to this point, has been to track and process my intake.
bookmarks and replies
personal data, like tracking my reading and listening
Wanting to reduce my use of Instagram and Twitter, I joined micro.blog in 2021. I use the microblogging service to post (mostly boring) things from my daily life. What I post on my micro blog is personal, rooted in connection.
day-to-day fluff (e.g. what I baked)
And I still have my Twitter account, which I created in 2014 and have used sporadically since, finding it addictive. I knew it was a problem when I started composing tweet commentary in my head as I walked around during the day. Periodically, I go through my past tweets and purge most, granting myself a clean slate from past opinions. I have to resist falling back into the habit of commentary, which I in particular needed to be careful of when I worked in local government. I hold onto this silo because I get very little interaction on my blog or this website, so Twitter remains in my communication stack for promotion.
anything I want people to actually see (e.g. IndieWeb events, friends’ accomplishments, personal promotion)
social and political commentary, when I can’t restrain myself 😎(preferably in my drafts folder here)
What writing belongs where?
The boundaries blur as I write more online…and add platforms
Now that I have more channels, I’m struggling with where exactly other content I want to make should live:
Personal accountability posts (like quarterly reviews) currently go on my blog, with the reasoning being that it’s about creative work and work-life balance…but it’s also very personal information, so maybe it makes sense to live here, where my other “currently doing” info lives? As I experimented with weeknotes this fall, I also posted those on my blog.
I’ve transferred my listening reports and reading reports here from my blog, where I used to post them before this incarnation of tracydurnell.com. I’ve been tracking listening and reading here, so it made sense to bring over the analysis of that too.
Sometimes I want to post personal posts about my life that don’t quite fit on my blog. I have tried posting those on micro.blog, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It also doesn’t necessarily feel right to mix them in with my feed of intake, here.
How long need commentary be to “count” as a blog post? Should some articles I post here instead live on my blog, if they are related to creativity or nature?
I recently started to add recipes to this website, which makes sense as basically another reference. But I’ve been thinking about developing more pages about specific topics that would be more original content — reference for other people, but thinking for me. Should those live on my blog?
How about a collection of photos? I’ve thus far limited Cascadia Inspired to PNW nature content, so I haven’t had a place to post non-nature shots or from outside the northwest — but photography clearly falls into the blog wheelhouse of “things I made.”
What is the best way to present my writing online?
As I juggle this increasing number of decisions, and want to add more varieties of content, it’s raising bigger questions, namely:
Should all of my writing and information live in one spot? I’ve been writing at Cascadia Inspired for ten years*, so I don’t want to erase that history. Yet this site bears my name. Does it make sense that the website under my name — likely the first impression people get about me — hosts my arguably shittiest work, while my highest quality work is off on another site? 🤔 *Dramatic music plays*
* And apparently I posted about my ten year blogiversary on Twitter but not on my website 🤦♀️
Am I comfortable having my full identity represented in one place?
It comes down to identity: I have faceted elements of my online identity onto different platforms, but the boundaries are mutable.
If you only read my micro.blog, you’d think all I care about is reading and baking. My Twitter account is mixed content-wise, but overall with the intent of demonstrating I’m thoughtful and enthusiastic. My blog presents a clearer picture of my interests and personality since it hosts my accountability posts, but paints me perhaps more philosophical and reflective. And this digital garden is the most unfiltered of my writing, covering the broadest range of my interests, but in slapdash quality.
Having only one platform would certainly make the decision-making process about where to post things easier. But even here on tracydurnell.com, I segment info by having a separate RSS feed for my read posts, which I exclude from my main digital garden RSS feed — in a way, filtering what identity is shared by different feeds.
The questions I need to answer before POSSEing my tweets
Do I want to post the kinds of things I’d post to Twitter here on my digital garden, or on my blog? Self-promotion might make sense to post from my blog, and promotion of others or events from here. Is the tone similar enough, or would it be jarring? Could it even be beneficial to mix in some more professional tone posts here? Would having some posts of a different tone impact my comfort in continuing to write freely and naturally on this site? Can I handle writing (briefly) about things I make here and not on my blog?
Do I want to expand this site beyond ‘intake’? Is it even expanding what I post here, considering I write enough commentary that it’s hard to say I’m not ‘making’ anything here 😉 Can adding tweets here also make me feel more comfortable adding the other things I want to add, like photos?
Is it too weird to post a note about an article on the same website? Tantek pointed out this could be addressed by excluding notes from the main feed, so readers could subscribe to notes separately.
Would I feel comfortable with my daily life posts from micro.blog also appearing on Twitter? Maybe. I use a chattier voice on micro.blog and try to be somewhat more professional on Twitter. It feels more vulnerable to share real life things to the broad and sometimes hostile audience of Twitter.
Generally, am I also comfortable expanding the range of what I share on Twitter? Posting more would probably be beneficial, but also means engaging with the site more often, which is dangerous to me.
How about posting what I would post on Twitter on micro.blog and syndicating from there? Yeah, this I’d be ok with.
Are there things that I post to Twitter that I would not want to lose? Generally no, though perhaps my framing when I share articles adds value — an editor’s note, if you will.
In thinking all this through, my instinctive balking at combining my writing streams may be more resistance to change than reasoned refusal — there are a number of potential benefits I’ve raised in this exploration. Instead, the problem is more in feeling comfortable freely expressing myself everywhere I am online, and letting go of my ‘work voice.’ As an anxious person who struggles with caring too much about what others think of me, this is rooted in fear of rejection. How much do these platform personas benefit me, and how much do they hold me back?
Also posted on IndieNews
Replied to Internet gardening by James G (jamesg.blog) Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on…