140Char

As microblogging evolves, I think there are going to be a lot of attempts to define what it is, and what sites qualify. And my own definition is somewhat unevolved at the moment, so I’m opening this one to you.

Do you think Tumblr counts as microblogging, and should be included in the site?

A lot of Tumblelogs tend to be short, sharp updates via the bookmarklet to quickly share a link, image, or video. At first I struggled with the idea of yet another site to sit between my main blog at TheWayoftheWeb, and my Twitter account. But I’ll admit that I didn’t think it through, despite playing around with an account.

I’ve got two blogs including this one, and my first, TheWayoftheWeb is fairly well established (Despite recently moving to Wordpress and self-hosting!). They give me the chance to post long form ideas, and develop theories, whilst also getting some interaction through the comments I’m fortunate to receive.

Meanwhile Twitter and Plurk give me as much conversation as I can cope with, within the confines of 140 characters (See, the blog name does make sense!).

But having chatted to two of my colleagues about blogging, Tumblr makes a lot of sense for them. They don’t have the time to commit to a full blog, or the conversation required to get the full value out of Twitter – and yet they both want to have an online presence and a place to share the things they value. And it seems to offer a way to display their personality in a slightly more obvious way than using Del.icio.us.

So that’s my case for why it’s useful, and picking some Tumblelogs at random, they show the short form, frequent updates we’d associate with microblogging. Here’s 3 examples picked totally at random from those listed on the front page of the site:

Example 1.

Example 2.

Example 3.

So what say you? Personally I’m leaning towards inclusion…