Tumblr photo blogs - transclusion goes mainstream

Tumblr is a quick way to set up a blog, particularly an image-based blog (one that is mostly photo posts).

Ted Nelson's vision of hypertext (Xanadu) included the concept of transclusion - everything would be linked back to an original source, with a full citation trail, rather than copy & pasted.  Transclusion turns out to be hard to do for complex things, so we basically didn't do it.  Even a block quote is just copy & pasted text, with the onus on the author of the HTML page to embed the correct links back to the source.

Tumblr gets you to transclusion quickly without knowing you are doing it.  In some ways this is an extension of the retweet and modified tweet (RT and MT) that we see in Twitter - trails of pointers back to the original source.  As with the new style Twitter, the metadata is created automatically when you click (Retweet for Twitter, Reblog for Tumblr).

Tumblr does a much better job of explicitly surfacing this metadata however, leading to popular photos that have incredibly long chains back to the source, showing the originator (at the very bottom), and crediting the secondary sources that it was picked up from.

So you start out with e.g.

* scilib posted this

and then it builds

* Bob reblogged this from scilib
* Sue reblogged this from Bob
* Alice liked this

all in one long unbroken chain (assuming everyone is using the Reblog or Favorite button)

Tumblr as a whole (all *.tumblr.com sites or custom-domain sites backended by Tumblr) surpassed 250 million page views per day (reported on May 17, 2011). 

It's easy to use with a particular emphasis on sharing, which tends to reach better the majority of people who like to share but don't necessarily create many images themselves.  Its focus on easy sharing (and good viewing experience e.g. on the iPad) make it a much more powerful sharing platform than Flickr.

Flickr is really focused on helping you maintain and tag your own gallery of photos, but pretty poor at helping you to share them or discover others (within the site).  Flickr does now let you easily link images to a Tumblr blog though.

These various characteristics (along with many other features I haven't covered) have led to Tumblr being adopted by some government organisations.  You can find some here

http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/politics

mixed in with other political opinion tumblrs.  A few key ones are:

• http://blog.usa.gov/
• http://statedept.tumblr.com/ (official US State Department presence)
• http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/ (from the US National Archives)

I think experimenting in this space is entirely appropriate - the nature of the web continues to evolve.  The current engagement levels with content appear to be low though (you can see the number of "notes", which combines reblogs and faves, on each posting).

To better understand some of the context around using Tumblr in the government, read Measured Voice's post Why We Recommended Tumblr for the New USA.gov Blog.  Their core point was "an interface that encourages sharing and interaction".

In general reblog & like tend to be the main methods of engagement, as they are built-in.  Beyond that Tumblr has very minimal communications features, with an asked-answered single question system.  There is no commenting by default - you can add a comment when you reblog something, but there is no discussion thread attached to a post, although one can be added, as blog.usa.gov does.

When everything is working well, you see both traditional network behavior, in which a posting may stumble along with a few hits until it gets reblogged by a supernode, followed by a flood of likes and reblogs, as well as global attention behavior, where the reblogs and likes sweep around the globe from east to west as parts of the world awake and fall asleep.

In case you're wondering how the discovery takes place, the Tumblr dashboard is sort of like a tweetstream - it shows postings from people you follow, updated continuously.  Your Tumblr dashboard becomes a bit like an RSS reader for the Tumblogs you follow, except with much more emphasis on the streaming nature, rather than trying to make sure you don't miss a single post.

I'm doing simple experiment just to see whether using Tumblr helps photos circulate more widely, by starting to post my Flickr Creative Commons licensed images to http://rakerman.tumblr.com/

As you can imagine, there are lots of potential issues with copyrighted images being endlessly reproduced, although at least as long as the original source is the creator (which is not always the case) there is an advantage in that the endless reproductions are tracked in detail.