Nontrivial Exercises

Tumblr-ing

If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

So say the guys at Tumblr, a new service that focuses on creating a very quick, one-way collection of information and a simple way to publish it.

They call them tumblelogs, and they’re really pretty innovative. Sure, there are plenty of blogging platforms, both hosted and do-it-yourself, one can use to publish ideas. I mean that’s what blogging is all about, and that’s what several million people are doing every day. Why would the world need another blogging service?

I know that I wrestle with the desire to write about the many ideas and subjects that I think about versus the time to do justice to the development of the thoughts and conclusions I would do for a blog post. Often I just stop starting because I don’t think I can finish right then.

Tumblr sort of gives you permission to be quick and random. There are no categories, there are no comments, the designs are very clean and minimalist. The format encourages and supports succinct bits of text, photos, videos, quotes, links or conversations. It’s actually really freeing to be able to simply put up a quick thought without worrying about all the metadata fit and finish that you would (or at least I would) with a typical blog.

They do offer a few pre-made themes but they also thankfully give you the ability to do your own design by modifying the CSS and layout of the HTML code.

Tumblr is fully hosted on the tumblr.com domain, there are no ads (at least at present) and they offer RSS syndication. They also support custom domain names if you want to use your own domain.

To write a post you may log in to your tumblelog and write it from the browser, or you can use a bookmarklet to quickly capture text, pictures or links while browsing.They are working on an API that will allow read and write access so you could use a blogging tool (like ecto) to write posts. You can also automatically import other feeds as posts, e.g. your del.icio.us - or ma.gnolia - bookmarks, your Twitter updates, etc.

I’ve created my own tumblelog - come check it out and let me know if you start Tumblr-ing too.