David Emery Online

Trend spotting

12 February 2008

There’s an ever increasing trend that I’ve noticed cropping up all over the place which I thought I’d highlight; it doesn’t really have a name – or at least a single one, yet – but can be referred to as Tumbleloging, Microblogging, Activity Feeds and many others.

All of these terms refer to essentially the same activity, namely taking the blogging format and removing the focus on long form posts that the medium normally implies and instead aggregating smaller pieces of content generated on other sites by the author. We’re talking about photos from flickr, links from Delicious, Twitters from twitter, events from Upcoming and more. It’s a very good solution to the problem of ever-more distributed content generation; a lot of people are generating this content as they become more and more active online, so it only makes sense to have some way of collating it together (which would be useful by itself, to be honest) and publishing it.

The distributed nature of this is I think the most important aspect. Flickr, for example, has the best interface for managing and sharing your photos online – there are many third party applications that help you upload pictures, and it has a built up community of users; why would you want to use anything else to manage your photos? Certainly any blogging package is never going to be able to compete with Flickr when it comes to managing photos so it makes sense to directly utilise Flickr in your (micro)blogging software.

The other element to this is that people are already uploading to Flickr; working as an aggregator to upkeep your Tumblelog you don’t have to do anything – you’re already doing it. One of the key difficulties that blogging faces (not that this is really a problem, as blogging is doing fine) as it shifts ever more mainstream-wards is that most people (think they) don’t have the time do it. With Tumbleloging they don’t have to do anything extra.

No, really – they don’t have to do anything – they already have a Tumblelog. In fact, you almost certainly have one already as well.

The Facebook news feed is almost the archetypal example of a Tumblelog. I would go as far as saying that it may well be responsible for the whole thing. Sure, it’s a private feed but it still follows the same concept of aggregating your activity, which then gets published (to your friends). I’ve written about Facebook’s news feed before (over 6 months ago, to my surprise) and it’s interesting to see that it really does seem to have started a trend, especially with the combined river-of-news-and-everything-else view that it uses.

I think tumblelogging and it’s ilk are going to spread pretty far and wide – in a couple of years it’s going to be hard to find a personal site that doesn’t use some form of microblogging/content feed aggregation.

More reading:
Mashable: Six Apart Launches Activity Streams for Movable Type Blogs
ReadWriteWeb: Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams
TechCrunch: SixApart Offers MT Activity Plugin: This Is Good
FriendFeed: Ex-Googlers Create Social Network Experience Using Feeds
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