Tumbling towards Bedlam; "30 Prufrock"

"With the inevitability of discoveries made late at night," I realized that I should start a blog of some kind called 30 Prufrock. An obvious obstacle was that I already have a blog, but then I read this article about the history and future of blogs and realized that I hadn't yet started a tumblr. Which I then proceeded to do. I discovered with some amusement that (a) line 30 of Prufrock could easily be adapted into a tagline, (b) one of Tumblr's free styles is called "inkhorn," which is appropriate on many different levels -- though I'm not particularly fond of the style itself. I haven't figured out what -- if anything -- I'm going to do with the tumblr yet, but its present format seems much better suited to a scrapbook than a blog. Maybe I'll use it for quotes or pictures I don't have much to say about...

I would treat the "blogs in 2011" article with some skepticism. At the top of the food chain, linkblogs are not dying at all -- Marginal Revolution and Andrew Sullivan are chiefly linkblogs -- and Yglesias's posts are as short and frequent as ever, though more often headed with pictures than they used to be. If it has become less sensible to maintain a link-blog for an audience of friends -- to my mind it clearly has -- this is due less to twitter than to Google Reader and Buzz. For me the decisive moment was when I realized I could pull out a paragraph from a magazine article and share it just by selecting it and clicking on the "note in reader" button on my toolbar.