The tumblelogging phenomenon is an interesting solution to the major problem with capital-b Blogging: that humans are intensely diverse and complicated beings, and consistent long-form articles are both impractical and inadequate for the type of creative expression toward which most people strive. In short, I don’t want to write 3 paragraphs about every day of my life, and you probably don’t want to read it. There are better ways to get the job done, and tumblelogging is one of them.
Tumblelogs are an attempt to capture the diverse forms of expression that the web affords; a way to present a reconstructed portrait of our fractured online personalities. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, and the problem continues to worsen as we are presented with a rapidly-climing number of ways to put ourselves online. Now that tumblelogging has had an official name for just under four years, I think it’s been long enough that we can make some judgements regarding the format’s success.
Tumblelogging’s most obvious win is that it provides a simple way to share
whatever happens to be on your mind at a given moment, with no concern for
editing or choosing the appropriate service or anything like that — as
Jason Kottke said, A tumblelog is a
quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style
linklog but with more than just links.
For services like Tumblr and Soup,
the user need only choose the type of entry (image, quote, link…) and drop in
one or two pieces of information.
But there’s always a downside. I’m not the sort that cries about the loss of some likely-imagined higher level of Quality that was part of restricting self-expression to those with more money and technical knowledge; instead, I’m primarily concerned with the increased volume of output that tumblelogs encourage. I don’t necessarily see this as a fault, but I do feel that it means current tumblelog implementations have served to worsen the problem of the reconstructed portrait I mentioned above.
I’ll grant that this may not be a fatal flaw — at least for the moment — but I see potential for the idea to be more than the current ‘post it all here!’ approach. I see tumblelogs being something more like Phil Gyford’s technique of publishing content on a variety of dedicated services, then pulling it all back together to show what was done on a certain day.
But more importantly, I prefer the curated approach. While this reduces the immediacy and freedom, it’s also a mindset that encourages the user to spread meaning. Casual sharing is better done with bookmarks and favorites, where the effort needed is equal to one’s interest.
There’s value in being able to click a few times and share anything at all; there’s more value in sharing stuff that matters.
