notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Permanence, Discoverability, and Control

I stumbled upon this post by quietbabylon, called “For Sufficiently Small Values of ‘Permanent’”, which I’ve chosen to sum up with these paragraphs:

Anil Dash’s post is about the importance of putting your clever/important ideas in a medium other than Twitter. Quick summary: There are a lot of good ideas in circulation on Twitter, but if you don’t put them somewhere like a blog, they are liable to be lost forever.

Blogs used to be the poster children of ephemera. It took the rise of even more ephemeral media (status updates and Twitter posts) for blogs to seem permanent. But blogs are no more permanent today than they were five or ten years ago. See also: dead Geocities, dying Delicious, and constantly ailing Tumblr.

What blogs and website have that Twitter lacks is rediscoverability. Twitter’s search is incomplete, missing what I’d think were basic things like searching a person’s timeline or limiting the scope to a list of accounts. On top of that, while the posts aren’t lost, we do lose the ability to search past 3,200 posts into the past—I needed Google to find that Dorsey tweet.

This is true, and far from unimportant, but there’s another thing that blogs tend to have that Twitter doesn’t: control.

If you own (although as the post notes, they’re strictly rented for a period from one to ten years) your own URL, and have a copy of your data, then you have a lot of control over your site. That’s most obviously true for a self-hosted Movable Type or Wordpress account, where you have the database and can edit the software yourself, but it’s also true even for Tumblr or Blogger. When Vox shut down, I lost control over the blech.vox.com domain, whereas if and when Tumblr closes, I can repoint the notes.husk.org cname to somewhere else, and (providing I can either replicate or redirect the /posts/id mapping) nobody will be able to notice the difference. (This isn’t just hypothetical, either: Tom Insam recently posted code that did just that.)

Discoverability is certainly important (and Tumblr’s archive pages are generally good for this), but a certain level of control is useful too.

In Praise Of Tumblr

It’s been a couple of weeks since Mashable’s comparative review of Tumblr and Posterous was published, and since then I’ve noticed a few of my friends trying out the latter service. I thought it was time I explained some of the reasons I’ve found Tumblr to be such a good fit for me, and why I think the review was a little unfair.

Posterous’ knockout posting punch is email — the technology that most of us take for granted on a daily basis.

Other people might still be email-centric, but I’ve long since moved to the browser rather than the email client for everything. (Surely the popularity of Gmail proves I’m not alone?) Tumblr’s excellent (and recently upgraded) bookmarklet is fantastic for easily posting images found online. Meanwhile, the composing pages on the web are wonderful: lightweight in just the way MT, Wordpress and Vox aren’t. OK, it’s not quite as simple as Twitter, but then, I couldn’t put this in 140 characters. Relatively friction-free posting makes me write far more (just compare the frequency of posts here to that over on my grown-up blog).

Tumblr’s also got something else that, sadly, nobody else has quite nailed - community. Since I gave up RSS in 2004 or so (I’ve since relented, a little) I’ve used the network/friends/contacts pages on the sites I use most to follow what’s up. Twitter, Flickr and delicious all do this really well, and so does Tumblr, with the Dashboard. Once you’re logged in it’s easy to follow another Tumblr user, and keep up with what they’re doing. (If you’re that sort of person, you can even drag in your Twitter friends updates. I don’t.)

Beyond that, though, there’s reblogging. Unlike the folk practice of retweeting, which is broken in more ways than I can be bothered to list, Tumblr’s feature is right on the money. Attribution and feedback are nicely handled within the dashboard. It even makes the decision of the site’s founders not to have comments a minor drawback rather than a killer - you can always add something to a post and end up with a real conversation, which is actually readable in future. Compared with Twitter or any other blogging platform, that’s a real achievement.

Suffice it to say, Posterous has nothing like either feature. If I run across your blog and want to follow it, I have to use feeds. (Obviously, Tumblr does offer RSS, if you want it.) You might not see this as a drawback, but nowadays, I think I would.

[Edit] I had another look, and it turns out Posterous does offer subscriptions. That’s still not as impressive as reblogging, but I thought I should mention it.

What else? I really like Tumblr’s per-month archive pages (Posterous only has per-tag). Tumblr has a good customisation engine, which I’ve used to make this site look like my main one (whereas Posterous locks you into a pleasant, but anodyne, theme). I’ve used a custom domain; although you can do that on Posterous too, Tumblr’s implementation is quite good. The “popular” pages gives a window into the community (even if it’s occasionally a bit scary). On top of all that, Tumblr has a straightforward API for import and export (which also makes me feel like I own my data; like edd, I find this pretty important).

Is Tumblr perfect? Of course not. The theme engine isn’t infinitely flexible, and getting an export isn’t one-click easy, when it could be. There are niggling missing pieces (I’d like per-tag RSS, for example), but all in all, it’s a pretty flexible, easy, and pleasant platform. I can see myself staying here for quite some while.