Curating online: Hobbies for the hipsters

Curating online: Hobbies for the hipsters

The human urge to amass rubber bands, garden gnomes and novelty snow globes has filled many a bottom drawer, mantelpiece and garage. Collections can be minor afflictions or life-consuming hobbies that lead to nothing but arguments with loved ones.

But where reason and divorce threats often fail to move these little pile-ups of knick-knacks, something else has already started shifting all this stuff – the internet. In the past three or four years, the contents of our scrapbooks and garden sheds have made their way online.

As well as putting our music, documents and holiday snaps up on the net, we're now sticking up all the weird stuff that we like to collect too. And yes, that includes snow globes – see Tumblr blog Ooh! Snowglobes.

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But since easy-blogging site Tumblr started in 2008, a wealth of bizarre but brilliant image blogs have sprung up cataloguing everything from beer labels to Lady Gaga's outfits. Introducing the notion that a single picture could count as a blog post, Tumblr has ushered in a whole new genre of websites – Tumblrs – that focus on collections of pictures, videos and sound files. There are 23 million and counting.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/curating-online-hobbies-for-the-hipsters-2325851.html

Veddy interesting.