Tom Hoffman shared this post about tumblr 3.0 the other day. The review of the feature set it offers was enticing enough to get me to set up an account.
It was actually so simple that I had a new blog running before I realized it. I haven’t taken advantage of all the features yet. (No photos or audio on there, as of Day 3 with it.) But I’ve been using the toolbar bookmarklet to grab and comment quickly on some stuff that I’ve been reading. And I put a link to it in the sidebar of the blog here.
I’d never heard of tumblelogs before. But there seems to be a few of them out there. I realized, after messing with it some, that it’s a little bit like del.icio.us, but with a more robust set of features, and no search functionality. That’s a problem if you’re making notes you want to find again. There are tags, but the field to enter them isn’t real handy, and I haven’t used any so far. At the moment, I’m thinking that with Google Reader, since it has a search feature now, I can subscribe to the blog’s full RSS feed and search through the archives with the reader.
One of the things I like about tumblr is that I can put more than just a few lines of text in the notes section. It displays various kinds of media, including audio and video, and it’s just as easy to use as del.icio.us. It’s got something called “channels” which may be like the del.icio.us/network, but I haven’t used that yet. I’d like to see them include a blockquote tag in the editor toolbar. And a URL-from-clipboard feature would be nice. Search, yeah, that too.
Tumblr seems like it might have some classroom potential. Real, real easy to use. It’s got a privacy setting under the “advanced options” button, which works on a post by post basis. No comments, though.
I’m going to mess with it for a while, for sure. I like it. Maybe I’ll be able to clear the dozens of open browser tabs I’ve been leaving open day after day.
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In my blog last Spring I likened Tumblr and tumblelogs to the commonplace book– a repository for bits and bobs of stuff. As a “blog engine” it is underwhelming, but it is exceedingly useful as a personal repository.
One thing I like about it for education (a facet I’ll be talking about in Atlanta next week) is that with their easy integration of other feeds they can be a kind of centralized aggregator for various streams– I use a tumblr to aggregate all of my feeds from del.icio.us, feed reader starred and shared items, Last.FM, etc etc etc. In some ways it is still rudimentary, but it is another step towards capturing the “lifestream” and provides an interesting look back over my days.
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