Very early blogs often had more of a Twitter/Tumblr feel in single-sentence posts. The style of longer articles/essays with titles only developed a little bit l

Very early blogs often had more of a Twitter/Tumblr feel in single-sentence posts. The style of longer articles/essays with titles only developed a little bit later. Take a look at one of the earliest weblogs, kottke.org in 2000. The posts there displayed have titles, but that is a post facto artefact of the CMS and current theme, not how kottke.org looked in 2000. If you imagine those titles and metadata away it looks more like a Tumblr. https://kottke.org/00/01/ https://kottke.org/00/01/ Most blogs in the early 2000s evolved into longer articles; but some weblogs kept the style and evolved it into another direction, mixing short posts with links, images, quotes and such. A term for that new mixture was tumblelogs. https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/tumbleloggingAssortedLarvae.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.... https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-vooly.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-v... That was all 2004/2005ish, before Twitter and Tumblr. So yes, Tumblr has is original inspiration in the the early blogging scene and I suspect the name too. But you’re not wrong, another essential part of Tumblr is the builtin social network and the new mechanism of commenting and reblogging. If I remember correctly those came a little bit late.