Dear Internet,
I am not certain that I understand why people have both a blog (e.g. LiveJournal) and a microblog (e.g. Tumblr). Why not just make small posts in your regular blog?
Sincerely,
Brian
P.S. For the purposes of this post, I am considering Twitter to be less of a microblog and more of a communications medium (because everyone pretty much uses it with SMS anyway.)
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for the same reason you crosspost this to LJ?
people like things to be in particular places
Wher’es your VLEBINAR?
@substitute: The MICRONINAR is starting in five minutes!
Hey, I’d LOVE to get of livejournal, but you fracking people won’t listen to me and move to a message board. Anyway, the conceptual line I draw is that LJ is for private things, or things I think most of the LJ people would want to see specifically. Really, though, Tunmlr is SO much easier to just throw up a quick post to link or whatever.
The real question for me is why Pownce and tumblr.
@Vortech: Ahhhhh! Very good point! I stopped making private posts long ago for various reasons[*] and had nearly forgotten that you can set up an intricate net of people who can and can’t read particular entries. That sort of thing is fairly unique to LJ–on very few other blogs and no microblogs that I’m aware of.
[*] I found that excluding people contributed to drama, that anything you post on the web, be it friends locked or not, has the chance to become public information, and that keeping track of what you told to who was way more work than telling something to everyone or nobody.
Regarding Pownce, I REALLY want to love it and use it. It’s a Kevin Rose project. The kinds of things you can post (images, video, links, party invites, in addition to text) is great and well-integrated. In most ways, it is a better system than Twitter. The lack of SMS is a total deal-breaker for me, though.
Tumblr, I just never quite got.
I operate under the principle that I won;t post anything to the web that I can’t have leak, but there are things I would not post if the whole world could read it (as much for my privacy as for presenting something that would actually be of interest if you knew nothing about me)
Pounce actually kinda ticks me off if I think about it. Just being from Kevin Rose isn’t much cache for me. I like diggnation well enough, but Digg is ridiculously stagnant given how much funding and brainpower it has. Also, it is increasingly filled with idiots. It’s hard for me not to think of it as the bizarro version of Plastic.com
And I have a similar problem with Pownce. It’s really just a combination of two other ideas (Twitter and tumblr) that will succeed not by being better or cheaper than either of those things jointly or individually, but rather because they have some big names in geekdom to artificially build an audience. And they want money for this.
Tumblr, as it was explained to me and as I think of it, is a place where I can have a feed of stuff I want to share that I didn’t make. Interesting links, or a neat photo, or some funny quote I found. The bookmarklet makes it really easy to just click a few buttons and up it goes. It sits in one place so you don;t have to clutter email boxes with forwards and it keeps your blog actually YOUR blog.
So the way I think of it is this:
*My blog Is for stuff I make that I think would appeal to a suficiently large audience of strangers.
*The tumblog is for smaller stuff that I found or just want to post without working on. ( I used to have blog entries that were just lists of links. I would try to make them inherently entertaining, but it always felt like a cop out.
*LJ/messageboards are for the more personal stuff that people would only care about if they knew me or by virtue of it relating to the thing we all have in common.
(Can you get a different font for the submission box — or at least larger? this is really hard to read.)