Gardens and streams
The web has two shapes. Mike Caulfield named them in 2015: the stream and the garden.
The stream is the feed. It is about now: posts, replies, the latest thing. Nothing in it compounds; yesterday's post is already gone.
The garden is the opposite. It is organized by links instead of dates. You don't scroll it, you walk through it. Notes start rough and get better over time, and the value is in how they connect.
Digital gardeners have been building gardens since Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens in 1998. The six habits that define one:
- Topography over timelines. Notes are reached by following links, not by date.
- Continuous growth. There is no final version.
- Imperfection in public. Each note says how finished it is: seedling, budding, evergreen.
- Personal and playful. Every garden looks like the person who tends it.
- Mixed media. Text, diagrams, code and images live together.
- Ownership. Your garden lives on your own terms, not a platform's.
What never worked was connecting them. Caulfield's original idea was that your wiki would become "connected to other people's wikis about things they knew." In practice, gardens became islands: you find the next one through a webring or a lucky link.
That is the gap The AI gardener and Caldera are built for. See also Rent the intelligence, don't sell the data.