AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Oh hey how apropos digital garden. A garden, in this telling, is precisely a place where wildness and civilization can be made to coincide, or in this case, more like the ineffable and the lawful, named, purposeful world of reason.
I kind of like this term, which encompasses whatever it is I am building here and other similar efforts. At least the "garden" part feels apt; I feel like it is this little semi-private space I enjoy spending time fussing with, and occasionally invite others into. "Digital" is one of those awkward techy terms (like "cyber" or "electronic") that definitely points to something but doesn't capture its essence, and feels like it will be obsolete in a few years.
Part of digital gardening is building your own tools. Not that you have to. There are plenty of specialized hypertext sites built on MediaWiki or other standard tooling. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but given my interests the tooling is at least as important as the content, and the gardens I find interesting are those that play with the format. For better or worse, in that kind of garden, both the words and the structure and design are all part of a single project of self-expression.
Bernstein has been creating commercial hypertext-related software for decades, giving him a rather good view of some of the practical problems. eg:
Gardens and Paths: Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting, but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes
"blogs killed hypertext". A story of how streams (from blogs to FB/Twitter) displaced gardens/networks, because they are so much better at engaging casual attention. The garden movement is trying to reverse that in part.