140Char

In this recent age of the social network explosion, myself and others have identified the need to work to amalgate your activities to one central location to be able to maintain your internet identity namely, your own website.

It is the job of this personal website to act as a central repository for all you social networks and external websites so you aren’t lost over a million, slightly overlapping networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk and so on.

I am just in the process of moving my currently Wordpress powered website over to Tumblr for a few significant (to me) reasons:

• Firstly, it occurred to me that if I ever blogged anything of interest which hit a nerve ‘out there’ then a decent amount of sudden traffic would clean out my bank because of the hosting charges.
• I’m a fan of Wordpress and am always a bit of a control freak and felt inadequate if I didn’t host and fully run my own website. I’ve gotten over this a bit and feel that in this day and age, such website pride not needed. Also noting that plenty of web guru’s don’t host their own sites helped.
• Wordpress updates always give me chills and they are needed airly often. I have had upgrades go BADLY wrong before, with all posts having to be manually re-entered.
• Like moving to Mac, I wanted to have my blog just work and remove some of the temptation to fiddle with it all the time.
• I wanted something more streamline and neat.

And then there’s my main reasons..

I’ve had my Tumblr account for some time and wasn’t quite sure about the concept. It provides micro-blogging, of a sort, but where post types are defined into text, photo, link, quote, chat, audio, video. Each of these types has a pre-defined style applied to it meaning it makes it easy to quickly post different types of content that looks nice and the main template can be fully customised with HTML.

Tumblr can seem a bit backwards on first glance, especially when coming from a full blogging platform like Wordpress. There are no categories as such, no ‘pages’ (static posts outside of the blog/date system) and the only real navigation comes as PREV and NEXT pagination. But a system as Tumblr shines when you embrace the format - it’s meant a blog - a date ordered, ongoing series of updates from a personal point of view. The one-page, single list layout that is Tumblr gives a great blog format. It means, like a blog, the main emphasis is about what it going on now and the Tumblr ‘dashboard’ gives you the means to quickly post content with little other thought.

Tumblr also provides domain customising so that you CAN have the Tumblr blog using your own mydomain.com address.

Archiving on Tumblr is handled in a unique way. Posts are date organised on a page in a grid layout with actual post thumbnails of the posts you have made.

Tags have recently been introduced but unlike Wordpress, there aren’t any functions to have all those tags listed in a sidebar or anything. BUT apply a tag to a post automatically makes a url of it, so that a posts tagged personal, can then be accessed in date order via yourname.tumblr.com/tagged/personal meaning you could manually add a tag list if, like me, you have a fixed tag list, defined in advance.

But still the main reason to switch a whole website to something like Tumblr is that rather than your main website being a hub for other networks you use, it means that your website IS one of those networks. It means your website ITSELF can be added as a friend rather than giving someone your username for a particular social network and having the friend have to go off to that other site and add you.

This is technically where MySpace was so far ahead but most of us didn’t realise because it was/is so poorly implemented.

Having this setup means that the potential for self-promotion is greatly increased as your website is inside a network.

If only Twitter gave this functionality - image it: your twitter profile page WAS your website with custom HTML etc..?

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…