Tumblr is what I’d call a miniblogging platform = multimedia-enhanced microblogs (like Twitter). It’s designed for short blog posts of text with a link, a photo, an audio clip or a video. I haven’t actually used it, but I’d recommend you check it out if you want to publicly post your photos or stuff you find around the web (remember when “blog” was short for “weblog”?). Tumblr is the hot platform of the moment for online humour.

Two of the biggest Tumblr blogs are conceptual political humour: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things and Uncomfortable Moments with Putin. Their brilliance unfolds by looking at posts in series; I’ll quote this cross-over even though it won’t make much sense:

The two leaders laughed awkwardly at Putin’s suggestion of a blog called ‘Uncomfortable Moments with Putin Looking at Kim Jong-Il Looking at Putin’.

Alison turned me on to Unhappy Hipsters, which adds mocking captions to photos from architecture and interior design magazines; eg:

To break free from the tedium of her own cliche—that was her Christmas wish.

The other Tumblr blog I’ve really been enjoying is Fuck Yeah Dementia (obviously questionable for work). It posts the best of 4chan macros (especially NSFW), lolcats, animated GIFs and other visual nonsense. (I’ve spent hours trapped in the infinite scrolling thumbnail archive.)

The future is blogs that aggregate blogs that aggregate blogs, all the way down. And when they feature humour objects, it makes me feel like I’m going insane, but in a funny way.

There are three ways to read a blog:

1. whenever you get bored
2. go to the webpage on a regular basis
3. through a feed reader

For the first case, you want a blog that has quantity of content over quality. A site like BoingBoing or Slashdot is guaranteed to have something new even if you’re getting bored multiple times per day. You don’t care about missing content because most of it isn’t that great.

If you’re going on a regular basis, you want new content at a minimum rate. If you visit too many times without seeing new content, you’ll take it out of your routine. You might get overwhelmed if too much quality content has been posted since your last visit. This is the reading mode everyone uses the first time they look at a blog: there’d better be at least one high quality piece on the first page (because no one goes through archives).

If you use a feed reader, then you don’t care how rarely content appears because you’ll be notified. But if there’s too much content then it drowns out your other feeds. Too-frequent posting is the top way to annoy your readers.

My Google Reader feeds are divided into three corresponding stacks:

• read posts as soon as possible (“must read”)
• read every post eventually (“should read”)
• read when I get bored (“maybe read”)

If a blog has so many posts that it distorts the purpose of its stack, it’ll definitely get bumped to a lower stack.

I tried to keep a posting frequency on this blog to satisfy regular readers and feed subscribers, but school has sapped my drive to write.