Why my own domain?

I never felt very drawn to social media platforms. To freely hand over my data and the content, be dependent from algorithms and trust them always felt weird. A lot of thoughts in this direction made me to registered kerrin.ch last year. Not with a clear vision in my head what I want to do with the site. 

My first approach was:

So, I was trying out things, quietly by myself, making sure never to press the publish button by mistake. But it wasn’t really inspiring, couldn’t decide what I wanted to share (is there not already enough out there?), annoyed if things didn’t work out and probably as well a bit embarrassed, because was not everyone else doing it?  

When Karlheinz Pape initiated the project “Website of One’s Own” in the Corporate Learning Community, to inspire learning professional to create their own website I joined the team and dived again into topic, energized by the small enthusiastic team.
It was great realizing that I was not alone with my thoughts, and I loved the image Karlheinz used “to cultivate one’s own digital garden“.

The output of the team effort was not only the guide on how to create your own domain on colearn.de but as well that I started again.

The why became clearer. Openly sharing your learning it’s more about offering your own reflection to others and not trying to push yourself into the timelines on LinkedIn . It’s not about showing off what amazing thoughts you have but writing as a tool to become aware of your own thoughts by putting them on “paper” and openly sharing them as they might be helpful for others on a similar path. Side effect of the sharing part is, that it lets you think about what you write a bit more than if you just scribble them into your notebook.

I came as well to other ideas about these gardens in the internet, like Tanya Basu describes in “Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet” in the MIT Technology Review 

Tom Critchlow: “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

Tanya Basu, MIT Technology Review

I decided to just do it…

It’s a test on how much I like to open my garden door, let people come in and look around. Comment about my flower arrangements, wonder about some or maybe laugh at them? Most visitors I won’t even notice, with other I hope to get into a conversation – online or even offline. To find like-minded, exchange, learn from each other and inspire others. 

But mainly it’s about the gardening. About trying out things, understand and learn and see where it goes. It already opened my eyes when I’m strolling through other websites and I look differently at them, at the layout, the design elements, wondering which plugins are used or if the theme could work for me. The beauty of learning new things and opening your mind to new topics.

…people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.

Tanya Basu, MIT Technology Review

So this will be my living prototype and let’s see what it will turn into one day, how often I will dig up everything and start from scratch or if it will end up as a forgotten, romantically overgrown orchard or an deserted patch of land.