Buzzwords fly around Internet communities faster than they swarm the jargon-laden halls of Brussels.

Here’s one: “tumble blogging”. According to Wikipedia, a “variation of a blog that favours short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.”

Also known as a “tumblog”. The term sounds like the title of a children’s game, like “tiddlywinks”.

And with Soup.io, it is.

The year-old site allows users to easily amalgamate various social media, blogs and RSS feeds into a literal stream of consciousness. Your Twitter, Flickr and favourite RSS feeds can pour into your Soup.io stream. With a slick interface reminiscent of so many free Web 2.0 services.

“I keep this Soup to share all that stuff with friends to allow ambient intimacy, with people who don’t know me yet to provoke serendipitous new contacts, for myself to build an archive I can later look back upon – and to a large extent just to indulge in the joy of creation,” writes creator Christopher Clay.

The tool lives up to Clay’s warm description.  If you’re an amateur blogger or student trying to keep up with it all, your cup of tea may just be a cuppa Soup.

But if you’re a professional organisation trying to this free tool to keep your costs down: Your meal ticket is elsewhere.

The EJC attempted to use Soup.io to show off aggregated “coverage” of Picnic 2008, a large media conference in Amsterdam.

Our Soup.io recipe: A feed from Yahoo Pipes, a feed from Picnic’s blog and photos tagged Picnic08 on Flickr.

Granted, our Yahoo Pipes feed included 105 blogs we expected to generate content from Amsterdam. A burdensome ingredient for any kettle.

Our Soup initially bubbled up and tasted great, displaying everything we hoped. But after a few hours, things went cold. Soup.io started timing out, unable to handle the large amounts of content we were throwing into the mix. It displayed only one item, a photo from Flickr.

We did everything we could. We re-assembled the Soup from scratch, reloading it bit by bit. It would work for a second, displaying a virtual ream of content.

After a few minutes, though, it choked again. We were pressed for a solution as Picnic 2008 began. So we plugged the aggregations directly into our website, thus abandoning our hopes of showing off our efforts on a slick interface.

So, tongues burned, we are looking for other solutions when it comes to ejc.net. There are several similar products we’ve yet to taste: Tumblr, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, Posterous, Pownce… the list of children’s games goes on!

Published: October 3, 2008