As someone who has blogged since elementary school, I’ve been part of blogging trends from archaic Blogger, Xanga and LiveJournal to oh-so-popular Wordpress (service and software) to various forms of microblogging, including Tumblr and Twitter.
Many personal bloggers who don’t have the professional need for the powerful Wordpress software have turned to quick and easy “tumblelogging”, namely, Tumblr and Posterous. (For those looking for something even more professional than Wordpress, check out Squarespace, but for those looking to blog for fun, read on.)
The lure of Xanga and LiveJournal was the social aspect of the “friend’s page”. Before people subscribed to blogs in RSS readers and before “web 2.0” and “social media” were even coined, people were networking in LiveJournal communities and checking their “friend’s page” of updates obsessive-compulsively. When Wordpress claimed the King’s throne in the blogsphere after Moveable Type users migrated over to what was free, RSS readers became much more popular and soon replaced older, limited forms of aggregators and communities. Then came Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous—the “you won’t understand it until you try it” gang of microblogging services.
While Twitter has its 140-character textual limitations, Tumblr and Posterous don’t. While Wordpress is a powerful but “lonely” software with no “social” community aspect to it, Tumblr and Posterous do. So why are David Karp, Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan so successful? Because anyone can “+ Follow” Mr. Karp and “like” his entries, and keep track of other fellow Tumblrers and Tumblrettes on personal dashboards. It’s like I have my handy dandy “friend’s page” all over again! If I were constantly on the run and traveling from place to place, I’d love Posterous for its ability to post via email. (Apparently, that’s the easy way to tweet from China, since Twitter is banned and Posterous is not.)
For me, I still update my 1337 blogs and keep the content I post on my Wordpress and Tumblr distinctly separate. 100% original, well-crafted, [mostly] error-free entries in paragraph form appear on my Wordpress blogs while “reblogs”, spontaneous thoughts, picture-only posts, and favorite conversations and quotes appear on my Tumblr. Some people describe tumblelogs as “scrapbooks” or an online “stream of consciousness”. Not many people use tumblelogs “professionally”—unless you’re NonSociety, but I sense the tides changing.
Just last month, four or so friends neglected their Wordpress-powered blogs and turned to Tumblr for all of their blogging needs. The obvious answer was, “It saves time,” but I decided to ask a few anyway to get some feedback to share with those who are new to blogging.
My fobby partner-in-crime, Teresa Wu, once had over 400 subscribers reading her Wordpress blog; then she decided to stop all of that and even forwarded her old domain to her current Tumblr, by teresa wu. Here are her reasons for doing so:
1) Access to community.
2) It takes 230492830428 clicks to get my post up on Wordpress, but about three to get it up on Tumblr. I also do minimal formatting on Tumblr, and things come out looking nicely.
3) I rarely have time to write long-form posts anymore, and my short blurbs and uploads just seem more appropriate on Tumblr’s platform.
Annie Tsai, better known to the e-world as “Annieisms”, was among the first wave of video bloggers back in 2005. She has since joined the world of Tumblr after finding it tedious to update her Wordpress (but Tumblr makes perfect sense for a videoblogger and media creator, when there’s the simple video embed feature). Here’s her explanation:
“I’ve had a Wordpress blog for a while now, and the updates really slowed down because I found it really tedious to post in. Yes, “Tumblr is just easier and faster,” but I can’t quite figure out why. Perhaps it’s because the creators of Tumblr have purposely stunted its posting ability? Wordpress seems almost overwhelming in comparison.
I never really saw the draw of Tumblr until I created an account… no one told me about the backend (the dashboard, likes, reblogging community)! Of course, I see it as a double-edged sword, because I’m afraid my Tumblr will become just reblogs, with no original content. Ooh, there’s a difference between Wordpress and Tumblr — I’d never reblog on my Wordpress, I would link.
Another point: Tumblarity. I have a love/hate relationship with it — I’ve never used blogging software that made my self-esteem fluctuate like crazy and determine my self-worth. haha.”
For clarification’s sake, “tumblarity” is a fluid number denoting a Tumblr’s popularity, derived from that blog’s recent activity (posting frequency, number of reblogs and likes). Very witty and manipulative, Mr. Karp.
Joseph Rosario, another long-time blogger and web designer, explains his blogging history and ultimate decision to use Tumblr, in detail:
“I first started blogging with MoveableType back before it was bought out by Six Apart. At the time there weren’t really a whole lot of choices. All I wanted was some kind of CMS that saved me from manually editing HTML whenever I wanted to post an entry. It was quite a learning process trying to figure out all the syntax to convert my page to MT templates, but their documentation made it reasonably easy to figure out. I have to admit that once Xanga and LiveJournal came on the scene, I was envious at the ease of setup. But the customizability that comes with using a self-hosted CMS remained a major sticking point for me to continue with MoveableType.
A few years passed, and then all of a sudden this Wordpress thing shows up and takes the blogging world by storm. The seemingly limitless supply of plug-ins, themes, and tutorials was a breath of fresh air. Based around the same syntax concepts that MoveableType had, I was really eager to replace it on my server. So I did. I think it was the themes that really drew me in, because I hate creating designs from scratch. I’m a lot better at editing pre-made designs than typing them up from scratch by myself. So I spent a good year to two years messing around with a bunch of random sites and wordpress installations. Not many of which I would actually use, but rather just enjoyed setting up. I stopped having the need for so much customization and configurations. Not to mention, I truly hated logging into my account every day only to find that 4 plug-ins needed to be updated.
I personally still love the Wordpress schema, but for my own blog, I prefer the simplicity of a Tumblr or Posterous. I originally began with the latter, but made the switch to Tumblr for quite a few reasons:
- the categorization of each post (photo, link, video, etc),
- the ability to style each type of those posts,
- cname forwarding my domain to my tumblr blog,
- managing the whole tumblr blog from one template page,
- and rebloging and following are pretty cool too.
Tumblr really seems to be geared toward short and simple posts, which I absolutely love. My daily life is pretty consistent these days, so trying to create new content can be a real pain. So for my personal blog, I normally just want to share a few random things that I come across during the day. And Tumblr is perfect for that. But if I were to create another blog with fixed content and lots of interactivity, I’d most likely choose to use Wordpress (or Drupal/Joomla if I could figure out how to use them). You just can’t match the functionality that plug-ins can add, completely changing the way the site functions.
Anyway, I guess I see the differences pretty similar to the way you do. Wordpress being for ‘professional blogging’ and Tumblr being used for ’social blogging’.”
With all of that said, I have high hopes for Tumblr and Posterous, so if you’re a VC, consider investing so that avid users like us can get new features! Time to Tumble a pulled quote from this post for y’all to reblog and link, hehe.