Tour de Tumblr week 6, post 1

Over the weekend some of you posted on Twitter how you were unfamiliar with the social media site Tumblr (and by some I mean 2 of you).   I’ve written plenty of stuff for less of a potential audience than that, so here’s an introduction to Tumblr!

If I had to describe Tumblr, I’d say the platform was a cross between blogging and retweeting.    To make very basic analogies, Tumblr is to blogging as Twitter is to Facebook. Tumblr is a more rapid focused form of blogging and repurposing of other users posts, like Twitter is a more rapid form and repurposing of other people’s tweets, which bear a resemblance to Facebook’s status update feature.  Another analogy: Tumbr is to Twitter as Instagram is to Facebook. Tumblr adds a strong multimedia component to a rapid newsfeed platform like Twitter, just as Instagram adds a strong multimedia graphical emphasis to the sort of connective network you create on Facebook.

If all that was confusing, just go back to the idea that it’s a platform where you can blog and reblog other people’s blogs.

I’ve been on Tumblr since around 2012.  It started in 2007, but I’d say 2012-14 was probably the height of the platform.   While I doubt it’ll ever capture the sort of zeitgeist that YouTube, FB, or Twitter have achieved, it’ll probalby continue on as a blogging platform, the way livejournal does. There’s lots of passionate people on there.  I have fun with it, anyway.

I’ve used Tumblr pretty exclusively for my hobbies, so my examples are going to reflect that.  I follow different Tumblrs, mostly related to the card game Magic: The Gathering, Marvel, or Star Trek.   Some geek celebrities have Tumblrs, too, but they post much less since those height years.

So here’s a Magic Tumblr I follow, CommanderTheory, and how one of their posts shows up on my feed.    Here they are talking about a new card, and discussing its design. (I cut off the image of the card, it’s not important.)

Just below their initial post, you can see a reblog from another Tumblr, odric-maste-swagtician, where they’ve added their own comments.  I didn’t see that reblog on my feed, as I don’t follow them. At this point another Tumblr chimed in, and again I only saw either of those reblogs once Commander Theory replied to that.  Finally I threw in my two cents (thelastvisibledog), but no one reblogged me. Wump wump. It’s fine, but I bring that up to show that there are probably different branches of this reblog that I don’t see depending on who I follow.   There’s a link at the bottom of every post that with the number of reblogs and/or likes. In this case, there were 87- you are seeing 5 of them here. You can access all reblogs, whether you follow the individual Tumblr or not, by clicking on that link.  

So reblogging allows for a way to comment on other people’s posts/blogs on your own Tumblr, while allowing anyone reading to see the thread and the initial blog post that you are commenting upon.    This is all pretty cool, and allows for some interesting discussions to occur. The Tumblr interface is also pretty intuitive to multimedia, so if you have intentions of running a blog with lots of visual artifacts that you want people to share easily, it might be a better option than blogger or something.

Because that’s the thing about Tumblr.   I feel like many people who have Tumblr don’t really use it to express their own thoughts, but to just reblog other content at crazy amounts.   You’ll find plenty of Tumblrs that are all about just reblogging cool images related to whatever theme or perhaps just general interest of the blogger.  But you can find pretty extensive blogs, too! My example post above was for a pretty quick comment, but that Tumblr writes extensive articles talking about card designs, deck building, and playing techniques for Magic.  

So I don’t mind sharing with you my strangely titled Tumblr, The Last Visible Dog (a reference to a children’s book I’d enjoyed as a kid, The Mouse and His Child, which I had rediscovered when I first joined the site.)   It’s mostly for reblogs about Magic, X-Men, Star Trek or whatever other cool image I come across. I did create a Tumblr solely for the purpose of reblogging images, Star Wars Cast Being Awesome, which was just about finding and reblogging candid photos of the origial trilogy cast.   There’s no original content on that blog, it’s just a strictly visual reblogging Tumblr.   If you go to that Tumblr I follow, CommanderTheory, you can  see a pretty well put together site.

I’ve honestly never tried until this moment to search for a Tumblr related to my schooling or professional interests.  I don’t explore the site as often as I used to, just checking in to read posts by a few of the Tumblrs I follow. Here’s an article I just googled with 41 best TUmblrs for designers  (not instructional, fyi).

If you choose to explore, I hope you have fun!