Tumblelog

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A blog featuring brief posts that combine text, images, videos, and links in a rapid-fire format without lengthy commentary
2. A frequently updated online journal that emphasizes quick reblogging and sharing of multimedia content over traditional long-form writing
3. A website maintained as a series of short, often reblogged entries mixing photos, quotes, and media rather than extended articles

Etymology: A "tumblelog" is a blog built from short, quickly posted fragments such as links, quotations and images, rather than long essays. The term was coined in 2005 by Jonathan Gillette, who based it on the tagline of Leah Neukirchen's Anarchaia blog, which described itself as "experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin'." Gillette's coinage was an early name for the microblogging style, and the blogger and critic why the lucky stiff picked it up that April, describing Neukirchen's blog as a "very long and narrow and distracted tumblelog." The word is a compound of "tumble" and "log." "Tumble" is the familiar verb for falling or rolling over and over, and the image suits a stream of posts that keep piling up one after another. "Log" comes from the older sense of a record or journal, the same root behind "logbook," which is itself a record of events kept in order.

Synonyms: blog, weblog, microblog