It's not how many are blogging, it's who blogs
Monday, May 18th, 2009 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianApologies to all of the people who read me for... well, I have no idea why people read me. I blog about too many different things, so I could never really hack it as a professional blogger. XD
But anyway, I continue to be fascinated by Tumblr and why they are so talked about and why they receive so much money, despite not making any revenue (yes, no revenue). Recently Tumblr introduced the new ridiculous 'Tumblarity' feature. As silly as it is in some ways, it probably WILL encourage people to tumble and to reblog more (you get points also for reblogging others, as well as being reblogged, I think), and it will provide a useful popularity metric (I suppose if someone wants to monetize?) Providing a list of the top Tumblelogs could also aid in discovery. If you're bored on Tumblr you can always, also, go and look at the 'popular' feature to see popular posts on Tumblr.
What struck me was that, now that I'm logged into Tumblr, I notice how a lot of the new amusing link of the day blogs posted on sites like Reddit and Metafilter are Tumblelogs. (It's often not obvious because you can use your own domain name w/ Tumblr). Minor celebrities, people affiliated with certain artistic scenes, often hipster meccas, are also on Tumblr, and have helped publicize it.
So maybe it's not how many people you got, so much as who you got. Twitter would not be the phenom it is if Shaq and Aston Kutchner and Trent Reznor etc were not twittering there. So maybe it's a question of 'what social network?' or 'publicizing to the right social network?' Hmm.
One thing that might work well w/ Tumblr is some kind of internal messaging. That might help make up for the lack of native commenting.
I tried out the SEEEKRIT BLOG thing with Tari, and it turns out that this is like a secret LJ comm, or maybe more like a secret group tagboard, given that you can't put comments on your posts there. It could have various applications if I weren't using Tumblr merely as a linkblog.
Another thing about Tumblr is that while it may be dumbed down compared to wordpress, it really is EZ to use. It is also easy to customize your template, for example. Even a CSS moron like me could do it, if she weren't so lazy, and Tumblr caters to people who like to change their layouts by making the customize button prominent in the interface. It also caters to Twitterites by offering many ways to interface with Twitter. (Wordpress.com, interestingly, also has ways of interacting with Twitter. I think I shall post about Wordpress.com later) It's not just pure feature power which draws people, otherwise we would all be using self-hosted Wordpress already. I think one example of LJ's antiquatedness is that the update interface hasn't been changed in ages. Still those same ugly scrollbars and drop down menus. I think it would be cool if they pulled up the frequently used options in a menu sidebar, like in Tumblr and Wordpress (such as Publish/Draft, tags, mood/location/music (well, I kind of wish I could nuke those, since I don:t use them), icon, which journal to post to; and, like wordpress. but the things that are not used as frequently, like age restriction, at the bottom as collapsible bars (actually in wordpress, you can also collapse the stuff on the side).
But anyway, I continue to be fascinated by Tumblr and why they are so talked about and why they receive so much money, despite not making any revenue (yes, no revenue). Recently Tumblr introduced the new ridiculous 'Tumblarity' feature. As silly as it is in some ways, it probably WILL encourage people to tumble and to reblog more (you get points also for reblogging others, as well as being reblogged, I think), and it will provide a useful popularity metric (I suppose if someone wants to monetize?) Providing a list of the top Tumblelogs could also aid in discovery. If you're bored on Tumblr you can always, also, go and look at the 'popular' feature to see popular posts on Tumblr.
What struck me was that, now that I'm logged into Tumblr, I notice how a lot of the new amusing link of the day blogs posted on sites like Reddit and Metafilter are Tumblelogs. (It's often not obvious because you can use your own domain name w/ Tumblr). Minor celebrities, people affiliated with certain artistic scenes, often hipster meccas, are also on Tumblr, and have helped publicize it.
So maybe it's not how many people you got, so much as who you got. Twitter would not be the phenom it is if Shaq and Aston Kutchner and Trent Reznor etc were not twittering there. So maybe it's a question of 'what social network?' or 'publicizing to the right social network?' Hmm.
One thing that might work well w/ Tumblr is some kind of internal messaging. That might help make up for the lack of native commenting.
I tried out the SEEEKRIT BLOG thing with Tari, and it turns out that this is like a secret LJ comm, or maybe more like a secret group tagboard, given that you can't put comments on your posts there. It could have various applications if I weren't using Tumblr merely as a linkblog.
Another thing about Tumblr is that while it may be dumbed down compared to wordpress, it really is EZ to use. It is also easy to customize your template, for example. Even a CSS moron like me could do it, if she weren't so lazy, and Tumblr caters to people who like to change their layouts by making the customize button prominent in the interface. It also caters to Twitterites by offering many ways to interface with Twitter. (Wordpress.com, interestingly, also has ways of interacting with Twitter. I think I shall post about Wordpress.com later) It's not just pure feature power which draws people, otherwise we would all be using self-hosted Wordpress already. I think one example of LJ's antiquatedness is that the update interface hasn't been changed in ages. Still those same ugly scrollbars and drop down menus. I think it would be cool if they pulled up the frequently used options in a menu sidebar, like in Tumblr and Wordpress (such as Publish/Draft, tags, mood/location/music (well, I kind of wish I could nuke those, since I don:t use them), icon, which journal to post to; and, like wordpress. but the things that are not used as frequently, like age restriction, at the bottom as collapsible bars (actually in wordpress, you can also collapse the stuff on the side).
