A couple (more) thoughts on tumblelogs
I wrote some time ago that there are many ways to keep a tumblelog, none of them the one true way, and that the one I keep is of the “editor of the internet” variety, which also applies to kottke.org, Daring Fireball, 3quarksdaily and other excellent blogs to one degree or another. I stand by that. I should add that just because you’re editor of the internet, it doesn’t mean you can never produce original content. All the three sites I mentioned above do, and succeed. Here are some more thoughts, partly prompted by an IRC conversation with Szymon and nostrich’s recent, excellent post.
I agree with nostrich that tumblelogs* will take off more than they’ve done thus far. In fact, I predict a two-way shift in the blogosphere: most blogs will drift farther towards tumblelogs, with more short posts built up around content from elsewhere, and then there will be a smaller group of blogs that undergo further seriousization** and become more like online magazines, only written by fewer people.
I disagree that people will ever stop rehashing content. Before the internet, people would retell old jokes, thinking (or at least hoping) they were still funny the fourth time you tell them to someone who’s heard them all before. When e-mail with attachments took off, so did resending old chain mails and other “funny” stuff we’ve all seen before. I sincerely believe this is a people issue, and one that is ingrained in human culture far beyond repair.
I also disagree that tumblelogs aren’t being taken seriously. They are, but only those who are already established and who don’t call themselves tumblelogs, even though in many ways they are: bloggers like Jason Kottke or John Gruber. Of course, they also produce original content, and they’ve been doing so since approximately the last time tumblelogs were popular, during the early years of blogging.
The conversation with Szymon I alluded to involved what is and isn’t a good tumblelog. He mentioned user-centered design, and I must say, I’m really opposed to thinking of your readers as a user, customer, consumer, or whatever. Readers are readers. Authors, excepting hardly literate, trashy buck-a-word authors, don’t think of their readers as consumers or users or whatever. An author is allowed to think of his readers as readers, people who will expend the effort to get the reward the author plans for him. That is, in a nutshell, how I view my tumblelog. In pretentious-speak, it’s a literary hypertext. That just means it’s a text with links to other places that is written for an audience that is sometimes impatient but often not, that will spend a bit more effort than average, but less than on a regular blog.
This isn’t the only way to keep a tumblelog, a point I think I made very clear the last time I wrote about this. Don’t get me wrong, I love Szymon’s tumblelog, Inspire me, now!, and if he applied user-centered design principles to it, that must mean user-centered design principles have something going for them. But it’s not the way I want to go about writing a tumblelog.
In a lot of ways, it’s not so different from what John Gruber has to say:
I wanted to write a site for someone it’s meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I’m writing for him. He’s interested in the exact same things I’m interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he’s read it all.I serve up content not by focusing on what I can do for the user, but what a reader that is sufficiently like me to be attentive and interested in lots of the same things as I do, might want to have served. In other words, I’m serving it to any intellectual alter egos I have out there.
Granted, there’s a limit to how many there are of those, so one has to make it a bit more accessible and bend a little bit to one’s readers. But just a bit. Not so much that it starts sucking.
Finally, I recognize that the most boring thing a blog can write about, is blogging, and by extension, the most boring thing a tumblelog can write about is tumblelogging. Hence, I’ll be quiet about tumblelogs for a while again.
As a by the way, I’ve already made both the shifts I conjectured would happen in the blogosphere myself: I used to have a blog, then I got a tumblelog, and now I have a new blog, which is updated exactly once a week, and which is deadly on-topic.
Notes
* And by that I do mean tumblelogs, not necessarily Tumblr.com. Conflating the two would be like conflating blogging and blogger or wordpress.com. Definite no-no.
** Yes, I know that’s not a word, but you know exactly what I mean, so shut up.
Reblogged from Daily Meh.
