There has been an interesting conversation bouncing between a few tumbleblogs over at Tumblr on reblogging and how tumbleblogs compliment blogs that got me thinking on how Tumblr’s reblog button can be improved and to improve comments for blogs.
If you’re not familiar with the term a tumbleblog is a short version of a what we now know as a blog combining different media types (audio, video, pictures, links, quotes, conversations (ITC / Tweets), and code snippets). Think of the Moleskin galleries you might have seen on Flickr with everything from notes, sketches and poems as an analog version of a tumbleblog. It is not so much as moving blogging in a new direction, but really just going back to what it used to be before permalinks, Google and Digg.
One thing Tumblr does very well is allowing people to use their “reblog” button to quickly add content from other sites hosted on Tumblr and still give attribution to the original author. The drawback is that both the original content and the persons site needs to be hosted on Tumblr. I think we would be better off if popular CMS’s like WordPress, Drupal and others started adding the authors name, blog’s title, and the post’s title in one of the available microformats (not sure which if any would be the best to use, still reading through them). Not only would a bookmarklet or other tool be possible to work just like the “reblog” button for any site supporting this, but other services like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us would have an easier time pulling in some basic information for a site or post.
While some probably would not view them as a true tumbleblog both Planet and Feedjack have and can be used to create your own. Remember with exception to adding options to change your theme, create posts and additional features like the “reblog” button most tumbleblogs will just pull in a set feeds that you give it. And that last part is pretty much all what Planet and Feedjack does. Some of the earlier examples of Planet that I came across were usually for a Linux group pulling in their members blog feeds (maybe even for a specific linux feed) and conversations from a IRC bot they would have running in their channel. Very stream of conscious and I can remember seeing many a conversation playing out in it. If you were to see the members individual site these little messages wouldn’t make since at all unless you viewed after they had been pooled together using the Planet.
Taking that idea of how those conversations worked across multiple sites I’m playing with the idea of moving the comments on a blog over to a service like Twitter or Pownce. This would get (hopefully) more people involved or at least following the conversation. The only downside would be starting to see more spam ending up in either service.
One Comment
Hey, Michael -
Joe Lazarus (on his Tumblog, of course) came right out and asked why reblog plugins are uncommon or nonexistent for the bigger blogging tools.
At first I was a bit skeptical, but quickly realized that I was overcomplicating the idea and it looks like I ended up thinking the same thing that you are.
I was actually thinking of bastardizing RSS for the data — basically having a “reblog URL” that’s a single-item RSS feed — though I’m not sure that’s the best idea. It has the benefit of pulling the entire post content (as a Tumblr reblog does), as well as retaining all the information you need to automatically provide attribution.
With a format defined, a Wordpress plugin then seems very manageable: each post has a reblog link/button/what-have-you similar to a trackback link. You modify the WP post page to accept a reblog URL, pull the content from the URL and prepopulate the post page correctly. (If you wanted to go crazy with the unsupported fun, you could even go the URI scheme route and have something like reblog:http://example.com/the-post-title/reblog/ to try to eliminate the copy/paste step.)
I’m going to try to play around with a test plugin a bit over the next couple of weeks, but I’m also very curious to see how you end up integrating the ideas you’ve outlined into what you’re already doing.
- Whit