My New Storehouse of Internet Miscellany

As you may have noticed, I’ve blogged less often on this site, but, I think, more contemplatively. Your mileage on that may vary, but it seems like a natural evolution of my online creative expression. If you’ll pardon the phrase.

But what of all the random stuff I used to link to?

A Boring History of Curating Ephemera

A little history. Way back when I started this blog, I wrote a lot of short posts, kind of mimicking (and routinely referencing) Boing Boing. These often pointed to bits of Web ephemera that I encountered in my work or personal time online.

There are links that I want to share, but I don’t care to write a full blog post about. Things like a semi-amusing nerd joke, an unlikely tattoo or a risque advertisement.

I eventually started serving up periodic lists of links instead of dedicating blog posts to them. Then I tried a link blog (the RSS feed still seems to be around) for a while, but Ma.gnolia’s implosion and my own waning interest put an end to that.

Then Twitter came along, and it seemed like a very natural form for sharing these web souvenirs. However, Twitter does a very poor job of archiving old tweets, and making them searchable (for example, I’ve tweeted way more than three times about the Canucks over the past three years). Occasionally, I actually want to find something I shared six months ago, and Twitter is no help. So, I have the sense that there’s no permanent record of this silly curation I do.

I started a Tumblr blog in which to store all this stuff. You can find it here:

http://darrenbarefoot.tumblr.com

There’s pretty much no original thinking there, just a river of stuff I find and probably tweet about. If you’re immersed in the web, you’ll have seen most of this stuff.

I’m still tweeting all these items–I’m just also going to push most of them to this site. It may prove of no interest or use to anyone but me, but I just thought I’d mention it. I also make no guarantees of its longevity–I reserve the right to abandon it at any time. If I stick with it for a couple of weeks, I might embed a view of it in the sidebar of this site.

Tumblr is Highly Presentational

This also, finally, provides me an opportunity to mess around with Tumblr. I’ve spent some time with it here and there, but I’ve never actually launched a site or anything. It’s remarkably stripped down. There’s no interaction without a Tumblr account, and even then they’re limited. There’s no native statistics package at all, and adding Google Analytics is a little clunky. There’s not even the identity widget that comes with Blogger sites. In short, it’s a really presentational form. I’m not sure what the obvious benefits are–but maybe they’ll make themselves apparent in time.

But it is searchable (at least by me), and I rather like the theme I picked. If there are any Tumblr users out there, I’m all-ears for tips. Check out my latest attempt at capturing the web’s most gossamer bits, and let me know what you think.