Web site review: Tumblr

I should have known better than to think that after my last post I could put the topic of blogs and blogging behind me.  But no sooner had I posted the entry than I went to check out the site called Tumblr to see what it was all about.

In a word it is a blogging site.  But it's not like any blogging site I've ever seen.  You can post all kinds of content, links, text, images, video, audio, and chat are among them.  They all mix together into the blog, which is kinda nice.

You also get to follow your friends and their blogs merge into your blog, like the Facebook news feed.

But there is little support for integrating the site with other social sites.  If you're like me, then you want this, in fact, you need this so that you can single source posts and send them out into the world.  But Hootsuite, my social media management site, does not let me post to the Tumblr stream which defeats the purpose of using Hootsuite.

Tumblr lets me post to Facebook and Twitter and they provide code so I can add a put into my real blog; see the column on the right for an example.

But the lack of support isn't Tumblr's fault and I find that site kinda nice and easy to use.  It has got me thinking about blog content in new ways.  Perhaps I should include more images or the occasional video here.

Perhaps.  It is something to think about.

I suppose if I wasn't so heavily invested in Blogger, I would use Tumblr for my blog.  But as it is, I'm not sure Tumblr holds any value for me.  If the integration were better I think my opinion would be different.  So I think I'll wait and see if that aspect improves before abandoning Tumblr completely.

And this serves as a reminder that social media is very much a work in progress.  None of us know where it is going but like reality TV it seems to be here to stay.  The question is how do we use it?  And I don't know that even the so-called experts have that answer.  That's one reason I've begun to experiment to see how well it all works together and how far I can push it.

I hope you will welcome these experiments.  I'm sure to blog about them here.