A tumblelog is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.

A micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due in that it is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size (e.g. text, audio or video) but is the same in that people utilize it for both business and individual reasons. Many micro-blogs provide this short commentary on a person-to-person level, or share news about a company’s products and services.

Micro-blogging is represented by Twitter, which I have my own solutions, you can easily start your own micro-blogging by WordPress plus a Twittress theme. While for tumblelog, it’s represented by Tumblr, as we can post pictures, videos, links, audios, etc under the tumblelog concept, compared with a micro-blogging, I prefer tumblelog much more. I found an open source tumblog platform this morning, and launched my own self-hosted tumblog…

Gelatocms is a very good open source tumblog platform that you’ll probably like too, it’s based on AJAX, PHP and MySQL, very easy to install and use, you can download the source code and install it in several minutes.

My own tumblelog is: http://my.charlespeng.com . As you can see in the above screenshot, it has all fuctions that Tumblr brings us, exactly speaking, it’s just a Tumblr colone. Unluckily, Tumblr is blocked in China, my customised domain name http://just.charlespeng.com can’t be opened, gelatocms has a fuction to import RSS Feeds, that’s why all posts in my Tumblr account can be outputed on this self-hosted tumblelog. (My host is also in the US, tumblelog can read tumblr rss)

Tumblelog and micro-blogging is hard to distinguish, in my point of view, you can publish micro media content to your tumblelog, while micro-blogging only text messages. We have another concept called lifestream too… Lifestreaming is presented by FriendFeed, it’s a web-based online RSS Aggregator to integrate your Twitter, Flickr, your blog rss, as well as other RSS feeds of your frequently used web 2.0 services  together into one place, and output in chronological order.

If you want to set up a friendfeed-like site of your own, I recommend another opensource software called Sweetcron, you can take my own lifestreaming site http://life.pengjiayou.com for your reference.

Free online tumblelog and lifestream serces included:

tumblr

soup.io

weguan

bloglove

storytlr

publr

jot.ly

meemi

posterous

twimbler

streem.us

ticketapp

flaker.pl

jaanix

scribblelive(live-blogging)

snappler(for mobile)

smalltalkr(tumblelog like )

Opensource softwares included:

gelatocms(PHP)
asaph(PHP)
indexhibit(PHP)
ozimodo(Ruby)
aintablog(Ruby)
chyrp(PHP)
nukumi2 (Ruby)
TB(Python)
sweetcron(PHP)

You can choose anyone you like to start your own…

There’re more and more lifestreaming services, such as FriendFeed, Tumblr,  Soup.io, Stream.us, LifeStream.fm, and much more… But today, I found a very interest lifestreaming service, yet another one, compared with these services I memtioned, this one brings us a lot of unique and much needed new features. This new service is called Storytlr (story teller).

If you don’t have a Storytlr account, I strongly recommend you register one compeletely free of charge. After you’ve signed up you are able to import and manage your data resources. Storytlr reads and imports data from your delicious, flickr, last.fm, twitter, and your own feeds etc accounts RSS feeds, and output it in ONE page.

Well, one of the most amazing features that you may be probably like is that Storytlr allows you to post your own content, for example, post your own current status, inseat your link, upload your images, and even write a blog post or inseat your own video files.

Well, the last great while unique features, all other lifestreaming services don’t have, but Storytlr brings us, is a compeletely new to the lifestreaming services, it’s named “Storytell”, it’s just this part where Storytlr got it’s name. You can easiy creat a “story” with your Flikr or Picasaweb photos, Twitter tweets, Youtube videos. You can think of a “story” as a text and media about a particular event compiled into one. To creat a story, you need just to input the title and click your mouse, Storytlr then puts all tweets and photos and videos into a little slideshow, take mine for an example, you will see what did I say on Twitter, what videos I uploaded and favourited on Youtube, and what photos I shared on picasaweb or flickr in October 2008 daily, with a certain time that it took place.

What’s more, your Storytlr account homepage is essentially a blog, where you can add your own comment  ajaxedly, just like you comment on a normal wordpress blog. You can also customize your homepage themes with your own background and header images, you can also add/remove widgets so you homepage meets your requirements most. Well, the last point I think you will be happy with is you can customize your own domain name, so it can be used as a real “blog”.

This is my own Storytlr homepage with customized background image and my own domain: http://my.pengjiayou.com .