I’m Tumblelogging

Ok, so in case you had not already worked this out, I tend to sign up for every new and interesting thing I hear about. Sometimes they are rubbish, and sometimes they end up being something I’ll come to know and love, and eventually use every day. There’s a growing list of services, many of which fit nicely into the idea of declarative living, down there in the sidebar of this blog (under ‘Feeds’).

So, tumblelogging. The name ‘tumblelog’ originates with Why The Lucky Stiff, in a post from April 2005. Anarchaia, cited by _why and others as the earliest example, pre-dated the term. Kottke has a nice writeup on the idea a little later too. Some more examples:

• project.ioni.st is a nice example
• Merlin Mann has one
• Eric Rice has a music tumblr
• ..and there’s a long and growing list at tumblelog.co.uk

Of course the idea of a tumblelog could be implemented in lots of different ways, including WordPress. I wanted to experiment with a slimline light-weight comment-free experiment running in parallel to my usual blog though, and I soon discovered and signed up to tumblr.com.  

rooreynolds.tumblr.com

The fact that tumblr now also supports feed scraping means it can be automagically fed things like where I am, what I’m bookmarking and taking photos of, all without me lifting a finger. Then I can throw in quotes, text, conversations and more really quickly and easily. I’m trying to use it to document things quickly, to get ideas and thoughts down without thinking them to death. Although the way I use it will no doubt change over time, I’m considering it to be a partly automatic web scrapbook.