* Tumblelogging, random shorthand blogging
According to Wikipedia a tumblelog is “a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.”
Unlike the subject of the last newsletter, Twitter, which is a stream of presence service, a tumblelog is more of a stream of consciousness or stream of interest service. It is sort of a clipping service for your attention.
I’ve just been looking at some tumblelog systems and I’m intrigued. Tumblelog software is available as both open source projects such as ozimodo (a Ruby-based engine) and Tumble (written in PHP), as well as Tumbler, a free hosted service.
When I looked through a selection of these tumblelogs I was struck by how much interesting stuff you could find if you look long enough. I was also struck by the sheer impossibility of being able to find anything you might have a specific interest in. Even tagging wouldn’t help much. That said, if you have a sense of a specific tumblelogger’s tastes you might find yourself following their posts for the sheer serendipity of what they come up with.
What does strike me, however, is the potential for using tumblelogs in an enterprise setting. Take any group such as engineering or legal, and give them a private tumblelogging system. Encourage them to post anything and everything of interest in their field such as links to Web sites, snippets of business related content, comments on projects, and so on. In this more restricted context, tagging should make a big difference and if you can add indexing, particularly if links in the tumblelog are followed, it should provide a huge amount of context that could potentially turn the tumblelog into a highly valuable resource.
