The Tumblr Ruse
Posted at 4:53 pm on Monday, December 10, 2007, in Technology, and tagged blogs, tumblr.
I have fooled around with Tumblr. It is alright. I would grade it as “so-so.” It is not a god-send. It is not other-worldly. It is a blogging platform. Er, it is a microblogging platform. It is a mix of Blogger and Twitter. It is not the second coming. These are truths.
Tumblr is a great application to post a mix of YouTube videos, IM chats, quotes, and other items, each with their own style. (Blogger cannot inherently do that.) CSS can do this with other blogging platforms, like WordPress and MovableType, and with some effort, one can set-up Blogger to match the output of Tumblr. (I should note that I am frustrated with Blogger and it is the global-reaching efforts of Google that is allowing the service to deteriorate.)
Tumblr offers only a handful of templates. Users can customize via CSS and minimal HTML editing, but I cannot tell — for the life of me — why the in-house HTML editor is a tiny widget on the screen. It makes editing very difficult and annoying.
One useful aspect of Tumblr is the feed regeneration tool, however, this will be abused by spammers in the very near future once they find out what Tumblr is. (Someone someday, and sometime soon, has to find out how to protect content published in feeds.)
A post using Tumblr is not necessarily shorter or quicker. A tumblelog is, by definition, “shorter.” People can (and do) use Tumblr as a regular blog, however, and since it takes the same time to read or view content on Blogger or Tumblr (or any other platform), it is essentially the exact same thing.
The main issue I have with Tumblr is the end-game. When a person gets involved in any project, they must evaluate the end-game, or at least have a general sense of what that will entail. It has never been a big issue with me since I’ve always used my own domains and my own hosting. But Tumblr doesn’t allow you to do that. Everything stays on Tumblr’s servers. Tumblr gives the user the opportunity to mirror a user’s personal domain, but the data is actually located at Tumblr. That is a big deal to me.
If I ever decided to stop blogging, I could delete my Blogger account, and that will be that. My website would still exist. All the data would still be published on my servers. Not in the case of Tumblr. If you deleted your Tumblr account, your blog would effectively disappear. (I mean tumblelog, of course.) I say “effectively” because the data would essentially be still in Tumblr’s database, but Tumblr would need to develop an export function for users to take their information with them. (Users must currently “save as” every individual page to create an archived copy.) But that would be meaningless unless another system was developed to read and republish that data in a meaningful fashion.
Maybe someone can create a plug-in for WordPress or MovableType to do just that, assuming Tumblr would allow you to export your data. But why not start with a better content management system in the first place, because that is all that Tumblr is. Tumblr is not a miracle for the uneducated masses to reblog everything they find on the internet. Or maybe it is.
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