Viral blogging

Recently, I stum­bled upon a site cal­led “soup”. Which, in essence, is some­thing like a collec­tive dump for things people find on the Intertu­bes. You can post texts, quo­tes, images, music and videos, with a handy book­marklet that redu­ces the time bet­ween fin­ding things on the Intar­web and them showing up on your soup page to a couple of seconds. And the intra-soup per­for­mance is also remar­ka­bly: every user can repost ano­ther user’s con­tent with the sim­ple click of a but­ton. Cou­pled with a sim­ple subscription/“friends” sys­tem which allows you to view a uni­fied stream of your friends’/friends of a friend’s con­tent, you can lite­r­ally see con­tent explode over soup in wave­forms (tracking of which is aided by soup regis­te­ring who repos­ted from whom and who repos­ted an item you put into the stream).

Of course there’s a few chinks here and there, but all in all, it works remar­ka­bly well. There’s fea­tures like end­less scrol­ling on the fri­ends pages, and even some sta­tistics for you ana­lysts out there. On a side note, I’m wait­ing for con­tent pro­pa­ga­tion stu­dies con­cerning this site, it’s bound to be only a mat­ter of time.

I star­ted won­de­ring what you could call the con­cept, this “soup prin­ciple”. And in a fit of minor mad­ness yes­ter­day, reve­la­tion struck me: soup is viral blog­ging. And “blog” refer­ring in the direc­tion of what ear­lier web­logs were about — a sort of drop box for con­tent you found on the Inter­net and wan­ted to share (which was rather import­ant when you didn’t just google ever­y­thing), not the heaps of self-centered con­tent crea­tion these days, bar­ring exceptions.

Blogs usually come in two major forms, when regar­ding the con­tent. There’s the topic-centered ones (like, for example, the Ger­man Netz­po­li­tik (“net poli­tics”) — I’m not really into the whole blog thin­gie cul­ture that deve­l­o­ped yon­der the pond, so just think of your own exam­ples), which occupy them­sel­ves with mainly a sin­gle topic, which can be broad. Jour­na­listic styles are often used, esta­blis­hing reports of infor­ma­tion scra­pable from the Inter­net, occa­sio­nally inclu­ding genuine (and poten­ti­ally off­line) “ori­gi­nal” infor­ma­tion. The other kind of blog would be the person-specific ones, with topics ran­ging from per­so­nal expe­ri­en­ces in life, like com­plai­ning about the crafts­men who just fucked up their kit­chen or what size of load they put in the crap­per that day, to dis­co­ve­ries they made on the Inter­net. But, mostly, they con­cern them­sel­ves with crea­tion of con­tent, not repetition.

Soup picks up some­where there, but in con­trast it focus­ses mainly on repe­ti­tion; you put things in the soup, and others stir it. You can add ori­gi­nal con­tent, which gives the soup a bet­ter (or, well, dif­fe­rent) fla­vour, but it’s mostly about see­ing what others pos­ted and repos­ting it. And in that sense, it’s viral: you inject some­thing into the loop, and it just gets pro­pa­ga­ted from per­son to per­son, sit­ting in their soups.

The effect is noti­ce­able in nor­mal blogs, too, but the ori­gi­na­lity fac­tor people try to intro­duce mudd­les the effect — blogs are a highly sub­jec­tive mat­ter, as oppo­sed to news sites and simi­lar, and usually don’t try to fuzz about it. But some­thing like soup, which just by its for­mat (you can add files and a descrip­tion — and actual text is a dif­fe­rent item from e.g. images) sug­gests you not to blow things out of pro­por­ti­ons, and just be the one who noti­ces and shares.

This can be seen as good, and also bad, but it leads to new ways of what you might define as sub­jec­tive: in being choosy about what you repost. Since you’re limited to small mor­sels of data, except the heaps of noise con­cea­ling data, you have to express your­self in a mosaic way of things — if you want to express your­self at all. But, nevert­he­l­ess, it allows you to put your own stamp on things in a decep­tively easy way, and thus, can be con­side­red blog­ging.

It’s get­ting exciting.