Okay. I finally grok Tumblr.
I didn’t, for well, since it came out until now. Actually, I didn’t understand tumble logging in general; it seemed gimmick-y, like a dressed up version of micro-blogging. And I never really understood the need for specialized tools for microblogging, since existing blogging tools are sufficient for micro-blogging: just type less.
But a lot of people whose opinions I greatly respect seem to be very fond of Tumblr, so I decided to look into it. And I still didn’t get it, didn’t grok it.
So I ignored it.
But it kept popping up in conversations, so I decided to give it an in-depth look. I read about it, signed up for it, and played around a bit. And then magic happened, and I grokked it.
I connected Tumblr to a thought I’d been kicking around in my head for some time now, and it’s usefulness was then apparent.
The main thrust of the idea I’d been thinking about was the aggregation of dispersed web presence and content. Basically, if you spend any amount of time on the Global Interwebs, you’re likely to have a lot of little pieces of found and generated content hanging around in a lot of different places: maybe you post photos to Flickr, or you dig stories on, well, Digg, or you have your del.icio.us bookmarks, or any one of a gajillion other things out there, from linklogs to product reviews. The problem comes in that nobody wants to spend hours tracking someone down on all these different sites or services, no matter how much they value the content that person creates.
So there needs to be some way to aggregate all this content that exists in repositories all over the InterWebs. You don’t want to Centralize All Content, because it becaomes a mess. And frankly, the ‘net moved away from portals like five years ago. Also, most of these content sites and services have communities built up around them — it would be detrimental to those communities to sweep everything up into one big central location. *cough*Yahoo and Google*cough*. So what then?
Enter RSS and its kin. XML feeds are nifty because they allow for quick syndication, and more importantly, they can be aggregated by newsreaders. And while people may not go site skipping all the time to find all the content another person has generated, they are much more likely to visit one site. And that’s where Tumblr comes in handy, because Tumblr has a built-in feed aggregator.
Tumblr will happily collect your Flickr posts, links to stories you’ve dugg, links to sites you’ve bookmarked to del.icio.us, videos you’ve found on YouTube, pointers to your full-length blog posts, or any other RSS feed you can throw at it.
Tumblr also has the ability for you to directly post other snippets of content directly, be they text or multimedia. So if you start a tumble log on Tumblr, what you end up with is a rapid-fire, simple, lightweight repository of most of the content you find or generate online.
Tumblr isn’t a perfect solution, by any means; there are some flaws I’ve found. For example, I’d like somewhat tighter integration into my website. I can do the URL thing, yeah, and I suppose I can duplicate my site’s design in a custom theme, but that’s superficial, and changes to my site won’t automatically propagate into my tumble log. Also, I had to remove my Flickr feed from Tumblr almost as quickly as I integrated it there: I don’t tend to post one or two photos at a time on Flickr, but rather several dozen at a time as I move photos from my SD card onto my PC. So when I posted all these images, I got a flood of entries on my tumble log that buried all of the other content buried there. Maybe thumbnails or a single link to my Flickr account would be more useful.
Still and all, Tumblr is a good little service, and what do I expect for free?
F.Y.I, my tumble log, the everydayordinary lite mix, can be found at http://lite.everydayordinary.com
