Bear's Log

I was listening to one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts (can’t remember if it was net@nite or MacBreak Weekly) and one of his regulars Merlin Mann was talking about wanting to try out a tumblelog.

Tumblelogs are not new in any sense of the word as they have been around in their “modern” form since 2005 (see Red Handed for a brief intro or even the first that I know of Anarchaia and also Projectionist.

The last one, Projectionist, I would have to say is one of my favorites and it’s one of the few that are in my daily feed-reader hit list. I think that the idea for tumblelogs can be traced to a number of bots that have been used to post to a website from IRC - a good example of that is The Daily Chump bot (started around 2001 as far as I can tell) and on their page they credit the idea to a bot written in Squeak (which looks to go back to 1999).

Anyway, back to my original point.

Basically I found it very interesting that early in the week one of the Internet “celebs” hits on something they think is new and within a couple of days it’s spreading across the blogosphere. I guess I was privy to seeing this meme take shape and, for me, it was odd seeing something spread that has been around a while.

I guess I’m missing what the tipping point was in this case. The really crazy part is that I’ve been working on some personal code that does some of what tumblelogs do - only my code isn’t limited to pushing text to a weblog.