Friday, March 30, 2007

Tumblr

I will admit that I am quite the sucker for signing up for new things that I find on the net. Some I just like to try out and see what kind of experience I can have with any particular service. I have Facebook, Myspace, iMeem along with my blogs and family website. I have signed up for other website/ blog services to see if there is anything interesting that might make me want to actually use for sharing things. I also use del.icio.us along with another social bookmarking service called Blue Dot. (I am going to post a comparison about these 2 services in the future.) I like using these online bookmarking service for a couple of reasons, to back up my bookmarks/ have access to my bookmarks on any computer and to share my bookmarks with friends and family. But really who of my friends and family want to see everything that I bookmark, plus I am not going to bookmark everything that I come across that I find cool.

That is where tumblr comes in, it is the easiest, most elegant way to share those little web snippets, photos, or videos with friends and family. I have had an account for a couple of weeks now, but have just now started using it for the past week. When I first found out about it, I signed up just to check it out and see what it was about. I very quickly set it up by choosing one of their templates. (You can edit the html to make it look the way that you want.) I love simple white designs, they had a couple to choose from and for my purpose of using tumblr, I didn't want to take the time to add my own design. Right off the bat, I didn't think there was much use for it since I have this blog for posting "stuff". I thought it might be one of those things that I would end up canceling my account. As I surf I see things that I would like to share with people, but there really wasn't a simple solution using my blog, such as a video or photo that I see. I decided to go back and look at tumblr more in depth.

It without a doubt provided that simple way of sharing whatever I want online. Originally I think that tumblr started out as a tumblelog. My guess is that the use was for as you "tumbled" around the net you could "log" your findings. They provide a little bookmarklet that starts the sharing process of whatever it is you have found. Based on what you are wanting to share it predetermines what it is and puts it in one of the following sharing tabs: Regular Post, Photos, Quote, Link, Conversation or Video. If you are on a site like Youtube or Flickr, it will automatically embed the image or video into the tumblr post, again very simple. You can share a regular post, a quote that you find online (if you highlight text it automatically inputs just that text), or a link to a page you want to share. As for the conversation I haven't used this one and am not sure I fully understand it. Maybe a conversation you find at a page, or maybe it can be used to "chat" by leaving messages on your tumblr page. One other use I could see for it is if you were wanting to share a conversation between 2 people that you heard take place. (Not completely sure.) You can also have it import post via rss from your other blogs, and more than one. I started doing this but have changed it due to that fact that I would like to keep that content separate. As with just about anything now a days, people can subscribe to your tumblr page via rss.


Regular PostPhotoQuoteLinkConversationVideo

As you can see it is a very easy way to share those small items that you find while you surf around on the internet. I have really found a use of for tumblr and enjoy it's simplicity for sharing content. Even if you have a blog tumblr is a very quick and easy way to share. Let me know if any of you get or have a tumblr page, it is cool to see what others find interesting.

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