Michael Caulfield uses the metaphors of the garden and the stream to discuss the web. The garden is rhizomatic in nature without a centralised structure, whereas the stream brings everything together. As Caulfield explains,
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. The Stream is a newer metaphor with old roots. We can think of the”event stream” of programming, the “lifestream” proposed by researchers in the 1990s. More recently, the term stream has been applied to the never ending parade of twitter, news alerts, and Facebook feeds. (Source)
Audrey Watters builds on this metaphor to compare LMS and Domain of One's Own.
