Move over Twitter. All the smart kids are now Tumbling. What is a Tumble Blog? It’s like an internet scrap book. Quotes, RSS, pictures and multimedia just stuck together in one place. When I first started this blog, that was actually exactly what I was looking for. I just wanted a place where I could keep and search the interesting stuff that I found round the web about the Web 2.0 and social media trend. Then I noticed some people were actually reading for some reason so I felt a responsibility to shape up and try to give them value.
Perhaps the classic example of the form is Projectionist. Pictures, quotes, snippets of code and conversations appear without the effort of creating an article or context or theme. It’s the Internet’s version of Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous writing. You find something interesting and you press the button and blog it. Your own personal digg and del.icio.us combined, perhaps.
Interest in Tumble Blogs has resurfaced thanks to the recent launch of Tumblr — a free hosting service for the format. Because of their abstract, semi-random nature, it’s unlikely that you’d ever subscribe to someone’s Tumble Blog unless you knew them personally or they were a celebrity for some other reason.
So that’s why I connect it to Twitter, in some ways. If you don’t know a person in the flesh, and care about them, then it’s unlikely that you’ll get very much of interest from being their friend on the system.
Tumble Blogs are intensely personal and mysterious to outsiders. They are fascinating in that respect. You aren’t so much seeing the way that they represent themselves (blogs) as the way they think: what they care about, how they represent information and their latest hobby horses. If a blog is analogous to reading someone’s diary — a spurious and condescending analogy, I think, incidentally — then a tumble blog is like seeing the pictures in their mind. Arresting and extraordinarily revealing in some senses; incredibly mundane in others.
I’m sort of wondering if blogging has peaked after its massive acceleration over the last two years. Because of the rise of services like this and Twitter. Blogging requires a fair bit of stamina. A considerable number of the blogs that I subscribe to have fallen into disuse. The idea that it’s going to make you a fortune has been discredited in many respects. For most magazines, the major cost is staffing, and that’s as true for blogs as it is for any print publication. More true, in fact, since the material costs of blog publishing are nothing apart from time for most people. But time is very clearly money for the publishers of a lot of blogs.
It remains true that people want to communicate and talk about the things that interest them, of course, and that blogs are a fantastic platform to do that. But it’s work; it’s a grind after a while. If you aren’t really passionate about a subject, then you’ll probably stop posting as frequently somewhere down the line. Maybe you’ll stop posting at all. Personally, I enjoy this soapbox and I’ve met some great people through it — virtually and physically. I won’t go down the Tumble Blog route any time soon. But I do understand why many people might do.
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Ian, I think the value of blogs is seldom direct financial rewerd, I see them more as marketing media in the main. The minute they move into direct revenue — magazine mode — then they start to need staff like any other magazine.
Now it may be that they will have a higher value multiple of value than paper magazines for a short while (ie reward a start ‘n sell strategy) but the end economics are driven by the NPV of their readers and that’s not going to change very fast.
Aaaaaaaaa! I also thought of writing a Twitter-Tumblr post because the two also make me wonder if I should actually use them.Not done with it, though. :)