So after some floundering about yesterday and this morning, I feel like I'm starting to get the lay of the land. I stumbled on this "Summer of Pub" post, and now I'm reading through some and seeing what this new community I've never heard of is like!
First off, Summer of Pub also posted this really good list of blog ideas, and it has an even good-er list of "experiments"
Reading through a few posters now:
There's a guy named bread (love it)
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I also stumbled on this post about "Digital Gardens" (the better half of Blargen). It's honestly so cool. I'm reading now about the guy who coined the term, Mark Bernstein. He was writing about how he thought websites should be designed at a time when it was so new and nobody knew how the internet would look or feel as it matured. Back then, people were worried about the potential for the internet to feel like a labyrinthine wilderness for newcomers, so they paid extra care to try and model the experience of being on the internet off of real-world curated experiences like parks and gardens.
This conversation that was happening in the late '90s and early '00s was all to address something called The Navigation Problem, where folks were trying to get consensus about how much people should be led through internet experiences and how much freedom there should to explore instead. But it wasn't until the mid '10s that the meaning of Digital Gardening really started to take form, thanks in part to Mike Caufield.