Tag Archives: Tumblr

02.07.13
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Toward a Theory of Quitting Stuff on the Internet

Scott Smith has some thoughts about why he stopped posting to Tumblr:

With a presence on various platforms – here, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr – I’ve been wondering how to balance them all without publishing the same stuff in every space. In particular, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to get myself to blog more. If you’re a writer, you tend to write because you have something in you that needs to be expressed. And writing it – as opposed to putting it in a song or delivering a monologue – is the best way to express it.

I’ve always marveled at people with the ability to populate 3, 4, 5 different social networks consistently (Scott being one of them), because I’ve never been able to do it myself. I can barely sustain a Twitter account on most days. One of the reasons I wanted to try blogging here again was that I figured if I’m going to have the energy to write anything else I might as well do it here, the one place on the internet I’ve managed to keep running all these years. Like Scott says, I might as well do it in a place I control:

It just became too important to me to own as much of the work I was doing online as possible. I’ll still post regularly on Twitter because what it gives me is as great as what I feel I’m giving to it. Tumblr stopped delivering on its end of that bargain so I found another way to keep writing.

I’ve tried using Tumblr half a dozen times, and I think it’s fun and extremely easy to use. If I were starting a brand new blog I’d probably use it, but I always struggled with the problem of what I’d actually do there. Share links and photos? Isn’t that what Twitter is for? Write essays? Isn’t that what my blog is for? I couldn’t ever find a place for it, and a big reason is because I had this blog, which for better or worse, is the place where people can find me.

Starting out on a new network and building a following always felt like too much work. Worse, it felt like I was cheating on this place, not to mention feeling like I had nothing new to say. Maybe it’s a matter of precedent. I started writing online (or anywhere really) on this blog, and that set my expectations for how to *be* online. Maybe Tumblr is the baseline for the youngs now and blogging on WordPress feels weird. Whatever tools you use for expressing yourself online, you need to have a plan to make it worthwhile. And part of that plan is knowing when to pull the plug.

PS: I started to write this as a comment on Scott’s blog and then I was all, “Screw that man, let’s do this old school trackback style” and responded to him here. Blogging!

11.25.09
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So yeah, Tumblr

Long-time Wood-Tang followers know that I make a habit of saying I’m going to quit blogging and close up shop, only to return a few weeks later with some sheepish excuse about why I really need it. I got to the point where I don’t even believe myself when I start thinking such things, and I taught myself to hold off on making such declarations any more. But I did want to point out that I’m using Tumblr again, mainly because it’s so damn fun.

I tried hard over the past couple months to turn this site into one of those Andrew Sullivan/Jason Kottke-style, quick hit, link-heavy blogs that I’ve always wanted to run, but the thing is, doing that with a standard blog platform like WordPress is a real pain in the ass and hard to manage when it isn’t your full-time job (see examples above). I really wish I could keep everything I do online in one place, but the ease with which you can toss off a link, quotation, picture, etc into Tumblr without breaking stride is just too much to resist. And while I’ve cured myself of the nasty habit of regurgitating every word Merlin Mann types, he hit it on the head with Tumblr:

I came to Tumblr because I wanted to revive a beloved and long-mothballed blog. And that choice became, as they say, a non-brainer once I saw the Tumblr bookmarklet. It’s one of the smartest and most friction-free bits of computer functionality it’s ever been my pleasure to use. Punto.

Now widely aped to varying success, Tumblr’s contextual bookmarklet has changed the way I use the web. It’s partly why I now recommend Tumblr to anyone who doesn’t want the burden of a “real blog,” but who’s also interested in giving the internet something more substantial than a one-hundred-character complaint about their meal and the person who served it — people who have that itch to share lovely bits of the world that come over their transom throughout the day without stopping the other things they’re working on.

So, as the kids say, fuck yeah Tumblr. If you’re interested in links, contextless photos, and Sesame Street hip-hop videos, check it out. I’m not sure what this means for how I balance what I write here vs what I post there. I suspect it will just be a matter of word count. If it’s something simple that I just want to post without much elaboration, I’ll put it on Tumblr. And if I find myself forming an actual strong opinion over multiple paragraphs, I’ll post it here. No promises, I may stop and start and let either of these places lay fallow at any given time. But at least I won’t announce it again.

08.19.09
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Tumblr Gets Cooler

Oh sure, just when I decide Tumblr and I need to start seeing other people, they go and add a bunch of cool features like hashtags and Facebook integration. Of course, my beef was never with the Tumblr platform–in fact, I wish you could implement that kind of content styling and ease of posting in WordPress without installing 4200 plugins. I just decided I needed to return back to Shaolin here.

07.27.09
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Will Social Networks Replace Blogs?

4164cWVMQfL._SL160_.jpgScott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, writes about blogs and social networks at Gawker:

[A]s people have flocked to Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, they will not stop posting to or reading blogs — but their patterns of blogging will change. The social networks turn out to be an easier and more efficient channel for casual messages intended for a handful of friends. If what you want to tell the world requires only 140 characters, you may well choose to say it on Twitter instead of in a blog post. As a result, some unquantifiable portion of the world’s blogging has already started to change, to become a little more deliberate, a little less telephonic in nature.

When I started using Twitter and Facebook, and saw the patterns by which other people used them, I thought for certain that they would gradually replace the more personal style of blogging. Why would someone go to the trouble of setting up a site, telling people to visit (and hoping they actually do) when they could just post their status, links, pictures, etc where anyone they care about would automatically see them?

But Rosenberg has a point in that social networks are becoming an adjunct activity for people who also have a blog. Yes, many people will only use social networks and never start a separate blog. But those people wouldn’t have started a blog anyway. Facebook isn’t replacing anything in that case, it’s actually providing a new outlet for someone who wouldn’t otherwise have one. But the types who would start a blog–especially one focused on a specific topic–will continue to use that format to say what they want to say. The blog gives them an independent platform that they couldn’t establish within the confines of a social network*, and the social networks provide an additional outlet for promotion and purely personal communication.

* Tumblr is a special case. It’s a social network at its heart: you follow other users, answer questions, “like” and “reblog” their posts. But its output also looks exactly like a blog. In that sense, it can be both, distinguished mainly by whether a person chooses to use it strictly from the Dashboard reading their friends’ posts, or concentrating on building a running narrative that makes sense to those outside Tumblr’s walled garden as well.