The presidential debates are a perfect example of how Tumblr handles a news event: as described by The Verge in a recent post, the blogging platform partnered with Livestream for something it called “Live GIFing the 2012 Debates,” which involved half a dozen digital artists and Tumblr bloggers watching the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, and creating animated GIF images of what they felt were key moments. By the end of the event — which took place in the middle of a party in Livestream’s office in New York’s West Village — more than 80 GIFs had been created.

The animated GIF is a shortcut to going “viral”

This wasn’t just a nerd-off involving a few Tumblr bloggers and similar “meme-driven” sites like BuzzFeed: More mainstream sites such as The Guardian and The Atlantic have also spent a considerable amount of time during the presidential debates generating animated GIFs (which are like tiny video clips) of the participants. In some cases it’s a gesture such as Joe Biden’s repetitive smile, and in others it’s what viewers might have seen as a key turning point, such as Obama’s line about the military not needing more horses and bayonets during his debate with Mitt Romney.

The drive to capture these moments is powered by a desire to spot the next “meme,” the viral photo or phrase or snapshot in time that will reverberate long after the debate is over — and for media companies, the desire to capture some of the pageviews and traffic that they generate. And this adoption of the animated GIF as a story-telling element for major news events is just one offshoot of the ongoing socialization of media and the news industry, something that has been driven by Twitter and other social tools.

One of the reasons why Tumblr is at the core of this phenomenon is that the platform is almost perfectly positioned between traditional blogging and the real-time distribution of content offered by Twitter: the “reblog” button that Tumblr offers is a lot like Twitter’s retweet function, and it can send a new animated GIF or other meme rocketing through the blogosphere within minutes, which has helped Tumblr generate a massive 15 billion pageviews monthly (the social element of Tumblr’s design is one of the things I’ll be talking with founder David Karp about at the RoadMap conference on November 5th).

As more than one person has pointed out, this process has telescoped the political news cycle (and arguably every other news cycle) to the point where stories about a newsworthy moment or event emerge within minutes of it occurring, as it sweeps through Twitter and then becomes the fuel for real-time commentary by news pundits and mainstream channels like CNN. The news cycle — which used to last for days or even weeks in some cases — now has a half-life of about an hour.

Does shareable also have to mean shallow?

Is this kind of thing good or bad for journalism about politics and other serious topics? There are plenty who argue that it is bad, because it focuses on the ephemeral or the trivial — like the obsession with Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird during the second debate, which produced lots of hilarious parody Twitter accounts and GIFs but not a lot of political commentary worth reading, or the similar profusion of memes around Romney’s more recent “binders full of women” comment. The potential problem this raises was highlighted by one Tumblr blogger’s comments during the last debate, as described by The Verge:

“This debate was more serious, so it was harder to find GIF-able moments,” said Dianna McDougall, a designer and social media consultant who served as one of the featured Tumblr GIF artists. Her career in live GIF-making started with the VMAs, when she discovered that instant GIFs tended to get instant traction. She also GIF-ed the last two debates. “People were picking it up, saying ‘wow, I don’t even have to watch,’” she said.

The alternative view of this digital version of the sound-bite is that it allows non-important stories to burn themselves out more quickly, rather than taking days or even weeks to be debunked, as Vivian Schiller of NBC News pointed out at the paidContent conference earlier this year, while on a panel with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. The risk is that people — including journalists themselves, as a Mother Jones writer noted in a recent post — become consumed with the ephemera on Twitter instead of paying attention to the important issues in the election campaign or any other news event.

And Tumblr is also only part of a larger trend that includes other sites such as BuzzFeed, which added a political channel earlier this year and hired Ben Smith from Politico to run it. That has raised the question of whether it’s even possible to cover politics and other serious issues in the same way BuzzFeed does a celebrity rehab stint or some other news story. Are animated GIFs and slideshows enough to get across an important political topic? Or is politics just another form of entertainment now?

Smith has argued that these tools that BuzzFeed and others like Tumblr use are simply part of the way media operates now, and any news category — whether politics or anything else — is going to have to figure out how to take advantage of it and make use of it. As the father of two teenaged daughters, I can vouch for the fact that the vast majority of the content they consume comes via Twitter and Tumblr and similar sites, through mashups and parody accounts and animated GIFs. Whether we like it or not, that is a large and growing part of the future of content.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Nils Geylen and See-ming Lee and The Atlantic

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The Berlin startup lets people create and upload stop-motion-style animations with their phone cameras. It may still be lacking a business model, but the changes unveiled on Monday certainly point towards the evolution of a more comprehensive platform.

The updates mean a prettier and more intuitive iPhone app (founder Tor Rauden Källstigen is very keen on green, it seems), a revised widget for embedding on Tumblr and the like, and the addition of friend feeds and Like buttons. The browser-based upload option is also very handy, especially given that most animated GIFs out there weren’t made using Loopcam’s app.

But, according to Rauden Källstigen, this isn’t about making the service some kind of GIF repository. Indeed, he wants to step away from the idea of being format-specific, as he sees it as too technical for the general user.

“Our long-term vision is to let people communicate,” Rauden Källstigen told me. “GIF is just a format. Part of this long term vision is to let people play round with all kinds of material, so this is a first step.”

“Later on, we will launch our API publicly and then people will be able to upload, download or do whatever they want with the platform.”

It does still sound a bit vague, but then again platforms such as these are about traction first and business model later. Just look at Instagram – the point is to make it fun.

So how many people are actually signed up to Loopcam?

Rauden Källstigen still won’t give hard numbers, but he did tell me that “the amount of Loopcamers around the world has now widely passed the six digit milestone”. The biggest growth is apparently in the UK, U.S., Sweden and of course Germany.

For a company that’s only been going for a few months, and that deals in a relatively unproven market lying somewhere between photography and videography, that doesn’t seem like a bad start at all.

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However, things online have changed since then. GeoCities is dead, MySpace is dying, and the animated GIF, initially reappropriated by the “cool” kids on sites and communities devoted to Internet culture, may be making a serious comeback. Not as a way to give your Buffy fan page some extra flair, though; instead, the animated GIF has become a simple solution for sharing moments of action online. Simpler, in fact, than an embedded video.

Animated GIFs can be found on pop culture blogs and in online art galleries; they are used for film coverage and fashion week recaps. Their invasion of web culture is pretty much complete.

Max Silvestri, a writer who creates animated GIFs for his Eater.com coverage of the reality series Top Chef, does so not because they offer a way to get around potential copyright issues, but because they’re eye-catching. “Embedded videos are easy to ignore. Or you watch them once and forget them. Internet content is constantly fighting for the attention of the reader, and I think animated GIFs demand it,” he said via email.

Carla on "Top Chef," via Eater.com

When Funny or Die partnered up with James Van Der Beek for a series of viral stunts dubbed Van Der Week, animated GIFs were immediately a key part of its strategy because Van Der Beek was already a star in the GIF world, thanks to the crying Dawson GIF.

The subsequent Vandermemes site, which launched with about a dozen new GIFs featuring Van Der Beek, was so popular that Funny or Die asked Van Der Beek to come back to the studio and shoot 20 to 30 more. Accordingly, Funny or Die has continued experimenting with GIFs in addition to its viral video content, a move that’s paid off for them in page views.

According to FOD homepage editor Darryl Gudmundson via email, a subsequent project mashing up footage of Justin Bieber getting shot to death with classic films “became somewhat of a game for our editors,” eventually getting over 400,000 views — in one day. A Saturday.

“GIFs offer a much wider audience than video because they can be posted anywhere. People can use them as a way to express themselves in a comedic way,” Gudmundson said.

It’s not hard to pinpoint at least one reason why the animated GIF has been reborn in Internet culture: In 1995, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology, the average internet connection speed was 24 kbps. Today, things are a lot faster. Thus, while GIFs do tend to be pretty bulky — a random sampling I did suggested that file sizes average around 400-500 KB, with more complex images exceeding one MB — they don’t choke browsers the way they used to.

Justin Bieber vs. Thom York, via FOD's Justin Bieber Gets Shot.

But another factor, according to Urlesque Senior Editor Nick Douglas, is that they’re now also easier to make. While Adobe Photoshop is still the primary tool used by folks like Funny or Die to create animated GIFs, there are now many online solutions that allow users to create GIFs without loading any software.

“A meme spreads faster when you make it easier for normal net users to participate,” Douglas said via email. “I Can Has Cheezburger made LOLcats explode by giving people a simple tool to make them. Memegenerator made advice animals bigger. The Rage Comic editor made ragetoons bigger. Having a web tool that turns a video into an animated GIF really helped the genre.”

The modern use of animated GIFs no longer sucks up processing power, and they’re easier to create and spread than a video clip. They also never stop, adding an eerily captivating element to their usage. With video, there’s a play button that you press; there’s a beginning and end to what you watch. The animated GIF, meanwhile, draws you in again and again, preserving the most random of moments for what feels like forever.

Said Silvestri, “The repetition of a small moment, watched again and again at an unusual speeds, brings tiny details into relief in a way I think you’d absolutely miss if you just watched a video of the same moment once. Also, they are funny and hypnotic.”

Picture courtesy of Flickr user Joel Telling.

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The video points to the site Jamesvandermemes.com, a Tumblr blog providing a selection of animated GIFs to represent nearly every human emotion, including Awkwarrrrd, Yawn and Eager Beaver (seen below).

The blog, which is maintained by Funny or Die staff, is also featuring other Dawson’s Creek-related Tumblr posts and has gathered 3,000 followers in less than 12 hours.

You might think his is just a sign that Funny or Die wants to turn the internet into the Videogum comments section. But oh, no, it’s thinking much bigger than that. According to a Funny or Die rep, this is just the beginning of “VanDerWeek” — which was created “because it rhymes more than any other reason.”

Thus, each day for the rest of the week will bring a new Van Der Beek-starring video experiment, culminating this Friday at 3:00 p.m. PT, when Van Der Beek will take over the Funny or Die Twitter account to answer any pressing questions people might have.

VanDerWeek’s genesis can be found in a meeting the actor took with FOD, in which writer Lauren Palmigiano pitched the idea of updating the crying Dawson GIF. Other videos planned for this week include one where Van Der Beek advertises some very special khakis, and one in which he makes up for the years he spent portraying Dawson, the perfect boyfriend.

One thing about this is very obvious: Katie Holmes, your move.

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