Gardens As museums of other's content

Nick Trombly organizes his content by tag and author. There are nuances, but a typical page shows all the content he’s collected on the subject, such as anxiety. By contrast, Andy Matuschak organizes his notes by hyperlink reference. The typical page shows a single note, with the option to display references to and references from side-by-side, such as Evergreen notes.

Nick’s site, identified as a commonplace book, contains little of his own writing. His purpose is to gather, like a beautiful online scrapbook, all the quotes, pictures, and other content which is forming his thoughts on subjects of interest. This aggregate of knowledge, when placed inside subject buckets, allows him to peruse all that he’s found beautiful or useful under a single subject. What makes it especially interesting is that he rarely limits any content to one subject, so a piece of content will display under multiple subjects. This has a subtle effect of moving the user cross-subject when there’s a related subject interest. Using his post on anxiety as an example, you will find melancholy a related subject that, were you to explore that subject, will have subtle similarities and differences.

The way Nick organizes these into collections is by tag: anxiety, work, etc. Any piece of content can have multiple tags, which makes it a network. This is my site’s current configuration, where every piece of content has multiple tags which form a gigantic interconnected network.

Reflection

My site’s purpose extends beyond curation. I want to contribute my own assimilations and errors to my site. My writing provides a context to the content I may refer to which I don’t want to lose. Nonetheless, there is space for content types which do not include my own work. These types, if kept separate from my own work, form a cloud of related knowledge which provides an explorable background context. My business writing, for example, quotes from 60+ books and more authors. While I might navigate by idea to one of these references, for the most part these resources will be hidden inside my notes unless extrapolated into separate content types. If they are separated, however, they will form their own distinct cloud of inputs which have formed the ideas which I have created inside their sphere of influence.