Bold New Experiments In Blogging
Figure 1: The USBFB Conceptual Map of Bloggin
Been thinking lately about the development of personal blogging over the past decade or so — which led to this diagram, which led to an idea for a project (below). Historically, since the popularization of Blogger and other initial dedicated blog publishing tools, it seems like the blogosphere has been moving from the top left corner to the bottom right of this chart.
This sounds asinine on its own, so let me explain.
Beginning with blogs incorporating only text, the last few years has seen the medium expanded to use increasingly bandwidth heavy forms of content. This was driven by (obviously) increasing available bandwidth, increased processor power, and cheaper storage. What’s notable, though, is despite all the doodads: increased social networking features, the development of the blogroll, and a bigger range of media to collage together posts from, the usage pattern of blogging stayed roughly the same. That is, individual writers made long format posts about their experiences and thoughts at a slow, regular (or irregularly slow) pace. The top two quadrants, then, seem to capture what we think of when we think of “traditional personal blogging.”
Obviously, the recent year or so has seen a change, building from the software developments in the mobile world into personal microblogging. At it’s most stripped down, this is the miniscule Twitter. In bulkier bandwidth formats, it’s Tumblr, which intends to be used the same way as Twitter, but with the added fun of full URLs, pictures, and, ultimately, video. Chartwise, this is part of a general shift downwards to incorporate the bottom two quadrants. In both cases, you’re supposed to be blogging-on-the-go, frequently, and with relatively shallow argumentative depth.
But, while brief pictures and links and words have gotten shorter and shorter, video has remained a long-format medium, even in the case of tumbleblogs or twitter. The peripheral stuff around a video has gotten more spartan sure, but people still use microblogging tools to post long-format video like shows, home movies, or whatnot.
As a result, there’s one quadrant left largely untouched by the personal blogosphere: bandwidth heavy (video), extremely brief, heavily updated blogging of random things seen and thought throughout the day (a la Twitter-style). It’s made extremely possible with the advent of things like the iPhone’s multimedia capability and the cheapness and ease of Flip cameras. Think of it like a video twitter (“vwitter”). The compound buzzword I’m thinking is “tumblevlogging.” I’ll be starting one as soon as I get my Flip later next week. So, more on this as it comes together.
I’m thinking you might be able to also interface it with Twitter (creating, god help me, a “twitlrvlog”), so that all your video just gets posted on blip.tv and then as tinyURLs for the whole family to enjoy.
[Been doing some research, and it looks like there’s some precedent for “video twitter” in the Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic project. That being said, his project concieves of these as a conversation, rather than a personal blog post per se. Moreover, at 00:18 seconds or longer, they aren’t nearly as brief or as clipped as a 140 character Twitter post. I’m thinking more like 0:03 or 0:05 at the longest]
(Diagram CC BY SA, Tim Hwang)
