Single Topic Blogs

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About

Single Topic Blogs are online publications frequently updated with theme-specific media content, in many cases through user-generated contributions. In comparison to other types of collaborative blogs, single topic blog are designed with minimal emphasis on site features and authorship of published materials. Instead, they are heavily geared towards facilitating mass replication of specific memes/media through providing custom image macro generators and relying on user-generated content/submission.

Origin

The concept of single topic blogging has existed in various forms for decades, beginning with Usenet newsgroups and niche interest BBS communities in the early 1990s. Following the arrival of CMS publishing platforms like LiveJournal, Blogger in the late 1990s and Wordpress in 2003, it became a common trend to blog about one particular subject rather than many.

In early 2000s, numerous photo blogs focusing on media curation bound by a single theme began to emerge, such as the French photo fad website À Plat Ventre" and the photo-a-day blog Project 365 in 2004 and the contagious media website Crying While Eating in 2005. The format took a leap forward in the late 2000s with the rise of shortform or microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, which gave way to some of the first single topic blogs like F**k My Life in January 2008, as well as Look At This Fucking Hipster^[10] in March 2009.

Spread

Following the viral coverage^[8]^[9] of Look At These Fucking Hipsters in early 2009, several other niche-themed photo blogs began to follow suit on Tumblr, including This is Why You're Fat, Stuff White People Like, Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves and Nic Cage as Everyone among others. In June 2009, Slate^[3] published an article about the trend of single topic blogs, crediting Tumblr's easy publishing and collaborating methods as the driving force of the meme. In December, internet culture blog Urlesque^[1] announced its picks for the Best Single Topic Blogs of 2009, which consisted of Awkward Family Photos, FML, Shit My Dad Says, There I Fixed It and This is Why You're Fat.

Single topic blogs have since become an integral publishing tool in the meme-making process for various purposes, from introducing experimental ideas to facilitating the growth and spread of existing memes. On Tumblr, the format is used to curate a wide range of viral media and internet memes, most notably advice animal image macros, photoshopped images and animated reaction faces among others.

Occasionally, the title of a trendsetting single topic blog is replicated by other derivative sites, such as the prefixes "Look at This X," "Fuck Yeah Y" and "Stuff X People Like." In January 2011, the meta Tumblr site Single Topic Blog of Single Topic Blogs^[6] was launched to curate the best examples of narrowly themed media.