You all know blogging is hot. But lately, more and more tumblelogs appear, weblogs on which images, links and quotes are collected and published in chronological order. Projectionist is for example one of those, or Tumble. These however do not publish information actively, but rather passively, as something occurres it gets blogged. That’s an important distinction in the blogging world, active versus passive media.
Active media is information that gets published after it has been written by someone. In fact, it doesn’t have to be written, it can be a recorded message (a.k.a. podcast), video or photo too. To publish this information, you actively have to make it, and afterwards interested people will view it. The creator makes it for a specific audience, and is focused on making it as interesting as possible for that audience.
It’s more interesting to see a picture than to see a picture of a picture. 
Passive media, on the other hand, is information that gets re-published, it isn’t always published by its respective owner. Quotes and links are an example of this. Although they can be published by their makers, they frequently get published by people who liked it, and refer to it. That same way, you can publish announcements for events on your blog while you don’t organize them. That information is passive, and therefore not always as valuable to the reader as active media. It’s a lot more interesting to see a picture than to see a picture of a picture.
The latest years, however, a lot more passive media is being published. Tumblelogs are a great example of that. A new entry into a tumblelog can be made in minutes, it can even be automatically aggregated. There are tumblelogs that aggregate links bookmarked on del.icio.us, songs sent to Last.fm or comments tracked on coComment, and display those in chronological order.
But what’s in it for the audience? Who cares to what songs you listen and what sites you like? The few people interested could be good friends who would like to know what you did on the internet recently, and for example find out to what events you would like to go to. Secondly, there are those people who accidentally visit your tumblelog, and are restrained from going back to work because it’s quite interesting. Probably, the one who visits your tumblelog the most will be you, if you for example want to know what site you visited yesterday about something, or what song you haven’t listened to in a long time. And finally there are the search engines, that rank sites with your links.
Anyway, it doesn’t seem there’s much of a gain in tumblelogs. It can be something interesting to pass by, but it won’t be something for a large audience. As Jason Kottke points out, most tumblelogs are written in Ruby on Rails, which allows to make such a blog very quick, so you don’t really have to care if it’s valuable to an audience or not. You yourself can use it, and that’s what counts.
