notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Why Use Tumblr?

Last month, I spent a few minutes with a colleague who didn’t understand what the attraction of Tumblr was. Later on, I posted an answer to a question on Quora, “If you have a blog and use Twitter why use Posterous and/or Tumblr too?” That answer more or less summarises the appeal, so here it is, crossposted out to something I have slightly more control of, and slightly edited based on some friend’s suggestions.

I have an old MT blog, a Twitter account, and a Tumblr. The former hasn’t had a post since January, whereas my Tumblr has about 60 posts a month. (Twitter is probably more like 300.) So, why use Tumblr not the blog, or Twitter? I’d say the three factors are posting UI, the dashboard, and the bookmarklet. 

Firstly, the post editing screens are specialised per post type, and they’re all pretty simple to use. Photos don’t have a title, for example, reducing the amount of work I need to do if I want to quickly share an image. (Compare that to MT or Wordpress asking for a title, excerpt, entry, extended entry, tags, categories, slug…) Personally I do spend the time to add a bunch of metadata (notably tags), but they’re less obvious and less onerous. Of course, unlike Twitter, posts don’t have a length limit (so you can say what you need to).

Secondly, the dashboard is great. Like the Twitter home page, it’s a list of posts from people you’re following, and as such it’s a pretty nifty tool for discovering things. However, Unlike Twitter, it had a sensible quoting/reposting tool built in from the very early days. Reblogging is different from retweeting: like “folk” retweeting you can edit and expand (or argue with) a point, but like “official” retweeting, it preserves metadata about who posted the original. The upshot is, you’ll see stuff your friends post, and if it’s something you’d like to share, it’s very easy. If they post something you want to argue with, that’s easy too. You can build long conversations on Tumblr, and unlike on Twitter they’re easy to link to and follow (although they’re still reverse-chronological, unfortunately).

Thirdly, Tumblr offer a JavaScript bookmarklet that makes pulling in photos and quotes from the web pretty straightforward. As a result, a lot of Tumblr accounts don’t really have much new content, but on the other hand, it does mean it’s a busy site, and anyway, curation can be as revealing about a person as what they create directly.

In summary: it’s easy to share things, either of your own, replying to your friends, or from the web, and without character limits.

On My Radar

Most of the time, I hide the Radar widget on my dashboard. Three times today, though, I’ve clicked through. And three times, it’s been a reposting of a photo from Flickr.

I know it’s hardly an original observation that Tumblr is all about the reblogging, but really, come on. It’s not even as if those photos are obscure on Flickr, either- they tend to have plenty of faves, or comments, or both.

Ho hum.

Watching For Attribution

bojo:

So, apparently this picture got picked up by the world we live in and is now doing the rounds. Great!

Only trouble is that Tumblr makes it really hard to know this stuff is being shared. It’s only because I saw an unusual amount of activity that I went into my Flickr stats and discovered that it had more than 500 notes from other Tumblrs! Surely there’s a better way for me to know what’s happening to my stuff? Can’t somebody join the dots?

Hm. Once you know something is on Tumblr, tracking it is easy: likes and reblogs tend to show up in templates, and if they don’t, there’s the API (or the Dashboard) to see. From that point of view it’s better than Twitter, where you get no visibility on favourites, although it’s probably only on a par with Flickr, which has the aforementioned stats for pro users, and Recent Activity (including showing who faved things) for everyone.

For the larger point, though, I suppose there might be a programmatic way of doing that. Google’s profile (based, I believe, on link rel=me data) knows that I have husk.org, flickr.com/photos/blech and notes.husk.org, and so Tumblr could (if they were so inclined) notify me on my dashboard if something from any of them were linked to.

I can imagine it taking quite a lot of niggly (and hard-to-scale) code, and things would probably still fall through the gaps, but it might be a nice thing for Tumblr to do to counter the perception that it’s just about the mindless reblogging.

Rich Feeds for Tumblr Blogs

benw:

the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.

So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme.

This looks good. I may even start offering feeds of my stuff through it.

Per-tag RSS feeds for Tumblr

I didn’t think that Tumblr offered per-tag RSS feeds, but after spending some time trying to hack the JSON output from the Tumblr API into my aggregated front page, I tried appending “/rss” to the URL of one of my tag archive pages, and somewhat to my surprise, it worked.

Of course, RSS is more useful if it’s discoverable, so in addition to the standard

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="All items (RSS)" href="{RSS}"/>

I’ve added

{block:TagPage}<link rel="alternate" 
 type="application/rss+xml" title="Items with this tag (RSS)"
 href="/tagged/{Tag}/rss"/> {/block:TagPage}

The second line uses Tumblr’s custom themes, in particular the {block:TagPage} element, to only advertise the RSS feed (through the standard autodiscovery syntax) on tag archive pages. This is in addition to the standard feed; you can decide between them thanks to the descriptive titles.

If you use tags and a custom theme, think about adding the same: it might help people who want to follow a particular subject.