Period Three Blog

Jun112009

Tumblr

Posted by Gene in Social Web, Blogging

We have several clients that we have setup blogs for over the past few months and we normally (almost always) use Wordpress. We’ll setup an installed version of Wordpress next to their website and pull in their post feed onto their main homepage or some sub section via RSS. We’ve done this with Twitter RSS feeds as well. I don’t really want to get into a Tumblr vs. Wordpress discussion, i’ve read them and honestly it’s not really comparing apples to apples.

Tumblr is possibly one of the easiest ways you can run your own blog on the internet, and it’s FREE. In their own words:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML. Even use your own domain name.

Tumblr really is a blogging engine at heart, but it’s more like a purist cross between a blog and Twitter. It really shines if you are looking to make short/quick posts, post pictures or video files. The thing is it’s not as intimidating as a full featured blog, the system gets out of the way because it’s so simple and you don’t have to worry about all the moving parts. You can just focus on what you’re posting and get on with your life.

Recently Tumblr has rolled out some basic analytics and social tracking features. The activity dashboard is insightful if you use Tumblr a lot, but doesn’t really get very deep, though you can setup Google Analytics to run on your Tumblog. They’ve also rolled out a directory of top users/posters, likely to fuel more usage as much as just show off the top users, much in the same vein as wefollow.com for Twitter users.

The real beauty for me is that Tumblr treats different media with respect. It’s not just about different posts, it’s about what media type you are delivering them in. It handles quotes and dialogs differently on posting as it gives video and images special treatments as well. The other really special part is the ability to follow and favorite other posts and Tumblrs. You can amass followers as with Twitter and they can re-blog your posts and mark them as favorites which in the world of social networking is a beautiful thing. One final thing that is super sweet is Tumblr’s native ability to suck in an RSS feed and let it roll in line with your posts. This is a really nice feature and they really take out any ambiguity about it and make it really easy.

Tumblr is really growing quite rapidly in user share, they’ve rolled out a slew of new features and updates to the core system over the past year that is really bringing it up to a level of maturity that makes it an option to no longer be ignored. However, in the end an experienced blogger is likely to feel that Tumblr falls short of their needs, and it may. With its lack of built in commenting or trackbacks or Wordpress like plugin architecture it just isn’t a full featured blogging engine. Hence it’s not an apples to apples comparison. There’s a lot of argument amongst Tumblr users about the lack of commenting on Tumblr. Almost half seem to want it (and if you do you can add a commenting system for free) and the other half really like the fact that it doesn’t out of the box. The point being, Tumblr is just a different flavor of blogging than something like Wordpress, but I think it’s going to fit most needs for us in the future.

If you’re looking to get going quickly, Webmonkey has a most excellent write up on getting started with Tumblr. Of course the only way to experience it is to go get an account for yourself.

Period Three - Simple, Measurable, Powerful.

Tumblr

Post a Comment 1 Comment

Post a Comment

Contact

Short Stuff