The very first blog entry
Welcome to Andrew’s blog!
After initially arriving at a website advertising a startling array of drinking glasses made by a company called ‘Tervis Tumbler’, I realised that the letter ‘e’ would need to be removed from the word ‘tumbler’ before I could make any progress in my Tumblr blogging career. “What is a ‘Tumblr’?” was the question I asked myself when I accessed this website last Wednesday night and the first thing that came to mind was not blogging. ‘Blogger’ or ‘LiveJournal’ sound like places where people can write whatever they desire on a daily, monthly or yearly basis, but ‘Tumblr’, from its pronunciation, evoked images of drinking glasses like those described above as well as the ‘Batmobile’ from the new line of Batman movies.
I decided to do a little research into the origins of the word ‘Tumblr’ and what it may actually mean. I know Wikipedia is not always a great place for obtaining factual information, but it is often a good starting point and has lots of links. It appears that Tumblr got their name from a term that, according to Wikipedia, was apparently coined by a freelance journalist called why the lucky stiff. Why the lucky stiff used the term ‘tumblelog’ in a post on a blog called RedHanded back on 13 April 2005 to describe what he saw as a new type of blogging on another blog called Anarchaia. Anarchaia, written by Christian Neukirchen, is quite interesting in that it provides a range of unrelated quotes, pictures and links to other blogs and websites. And from why the lucky stiff’s description, this is essentially what a tumblelog is. Tumblr provides the following explanation of a tumblelog: “To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.”
I have personally never written a blog that I frequently update, (or a tumblelog for that matter) so I am looking forward to doing just that. What I hope to take out of this course is a better understanding of how the online world is influencing the current model of journalism. On this blog, I hope to write on a range of topics that interest me which include news in general, film, music and literature.
