A small taxonomy of digital gardens
Surveying how people structure personal knowledge sites — and where the ideas/research/notes/thoughts split comes from.
Personal sites cluster into a few recurring shapes. After reading through a few dozen, here's a rough taxonomy.
The shapes
- The stream. Reverse-chronological blog. Simple, familiar, recency-biased.
- The wiki. Densely interlinked, non-linear, hard to enter cold.
- The garden. A middle path: sectioned, evergreen, lightly linked.
Why sections
Most gardens converge on a handful of top-level buckets by maturity:
| Section | Maturity | Purpose | | --------- | ------------- | -------------------------------- | | Ideas | seedling | capture sparks fast | | Research | growing | structured investigation | | Notes | evergreen | reusable reference | | Thoughts | flowering | opinions and essays |
This site uses exactly that split, plus a Files bed for downloadable artifacts.
Takeaway
The taxonomy isn't sacred — it's scaffolding. The point is to lower the friction of writing something down before it's "ready."