Tumblr: Autism for the rest of us
The American Prospect has a great profile of Tumblr as a medium:
It’s this built-in community — a more formal linkage than most traditional blogs have — that leads to Tumblr’s focus on curation. According to Tumblr’s Web site, each month the average user creates 14 original posts, half of which are photos, and reblogs three. If you follow someone because you love her impeccable taste in vintage photos of Stevie Nicks, you might find that she is frequently reblogging from another Tumblr — and then start following that tumblelogger, too. It’s akin to the way that taste organically develops; you like a band, and you hear them mention an influence, and then you go out and buy that record, too.
If you don’t know what Tumblr is, I suggest you check it out. Here is my tumblr, here is Dan Rothschild’s, here is Robert Reich’s and here’s Merlin Mann’s. The article makes the point that the unlike blogs, tumblelogs are not about original content so much as about curation of other people’s content. My tumblr is an idiosyncratic collection of things I like or find amusing. If you share my tastes, you’ll enjoy it. Other tumblrs curate a particular topic. There are many “Fuck Yeah” tumblelogs, such as Fuck Yeah DC, Fuck Yeah Lost, Fuck Yeah Leonard Nimoy, and one of my favorites, Fuck Yeah Owls. It therefore surprises me that the ratio of original to reblogged content is so high.
Reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy a while back, I thought he might as well have been writing about Tumblr. The (autistic) notion of breaking down culture into tiny fragments and then ordering them however makes sense to us is basically what Tumblr is about. In many ways Marginal Revolution is a lot more like a tumblelog than a typical blog.
The community aspect of Tumblr that the American Prospect article lauds is possible because Tumblr combines the best parts of the open web and walled gardens like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, your tumblelog is visible to the wider web and anyone can view and link to you. You could visit a tumblelog and not realize that it’s hosted at Tumblr. However, if you are a Tumblr user, you will know that you’re looking at a Tumblr site and you can choose to “follow” or subscribe to the site. You then experience the content inside of Tumblr’s interface, which makes much easier and enjoyable to consume lots of content, much like Facebook’s news stream. And like with Facebook’s interface, it’s easy to “like” and reblog content, and that’s where the community forms.
Other great tumblelogs: Soxiam, Westworld, Stare Hard, Yeah, I Was in the Shit.
