I'm Now a Tumblelogger

On a whim today, I took a little online discovery and decided to play with it a bit.

By listening to a recent Rocketboom podcast, and then doing a Google search and finding out some additional information, I decided to get in on what's called tumblelogging.

I went to one of the main tumblelogging site providers, Tumblr (sort of like blogger,com for traditional blogging), and within minutes I had set up my free account and designed my own tumblelog. I call it "Chain-link Deja Vu," and it's located here.

What, I hear you ask, is tumblelogging? Well, being fairly ignorant of the finer points (I still have no idea how it got started, or how many people are doing it), I can only give my impressions. From what I see, tumblelogging is designed for people who spend a fair amount of time online and who want to blog, but have very little time in which to do so. Another way I look at it is, it's blogging created by (and viewed by) people who, at least at some point during each day, have ADD-like attention spans.

Now, I still will keep on with Muley's World, this being the place where I will post when I want to really say something, especially when I want feedback from readers. But having a tumblelogging site, I think, won't really compete with Muley's World, but will complement it.

A tumblelogging site, in effect, is an online depository for all those neat or curious little things we find while surfing the Internet. We want to keep that stuff handy somewhere so we can experience it again, and we often want to let other people see it as well. But, we don't necessarily want to sit down and do a big descriptive post and manipulate a lot of screens and HTML language just to do that.

The tumblelogging site has buttons to let you add things such as quotes, pictures, videos, songs, text and even the transcripts of instant message conversations. Here's how it works. You download a little button on your bookmarks bar that says "Share on Tumblr." Then, if you happen to be surfing the Web and come across a neat photo or YouTube video or article, you just hit the "Share on Tumblr" button. You see a little screen come up with the item's URL code already entered. You give it a headline (if you wish) and maybe write a short explanatory description (if you wish), press the button, and it's automatically put on your Tumblr site. When you go later to look, it will be there.

I like quotations, and in Tumblr, all you do is hit the button marked Quotes, type in the quotation text and the name of the author, then send it to your site. It will automatically format it in quotation style for you. Neat.

Tumblelogging seems designed to be very simple, maybe too simple for some tastes. You can't do things like size photos, add tags or change posting dates and times, and there are no mechanisms for you to leave or receive comments, which I think is unfortunate. However, I think there might be a method they have of seeing what other people are "following" your blog, but I haven't investigated that yet.

I'm not sure how often I will use this. It might just be another one of those online nifties that lose their appeal after the newness wears off. But I'll still have a free way to store all my favorite online discoveries in one place, to revisit at my leisure. And that's worth something.