Thing #1: Blogs
I’ve wanted to start a blog for a long time. Not because I think I have a lot of important things to say, but because I think the process of writing a blog would be good for me. It would:
- Provoke me to slow down and reflect deeper and longer on a specific topic
- Help organize my thoughts and work out theories
- Share with others and (hopefully) provoke responses and conversations
- Give me a chance to pause consumption and focus on creation/production
Others, particularly Andy and Amanda, encouraged me to start a Wordpress blog for the above reasons. I thought it was a great idea, started looking into Wordpress themes and hosting and now, a few months later, I have a tumblr blog. What gives? Read on to find out why I went with tumblr.
Visually Appealing
I think as far as full blogging platforms go, Wordpress rocks. Blogger (Blogspot) just doesn’t look that nice (sorry Google!). Don’t get me wrong, there are some great blogs on the platform, The Innovative Educator comes to mind, but its look just wasn’t for me. Wordpress blogs (usually) look the best, have a wide variety customizable themes and are very powerful in what they can do.
But I realized something. Most blogs tend to fill up their sidebars with all kinds of widgets, gadgets, badges, links, etc. To me, those are visually distracting and I didn’t want my blog to get cluttered. I could pull that off with Wordpress, but it would require finding a theme that is designed for simplicity and then working to keep it simple. Not saying it can’t be done.
However, tumblr basically forces simplicity, that’s half the point. There are a large number of very nicely designed themes that are both simple, visually appealing and easy to read. Setting them up is simple as well. Going with tumblr takes a level of thinking out of setting the blog up.
Easy to Manage/Post
tumblr also makes management and posting simple. As far as management goes, you choose your theme, write a quick little ‘info’ blurb, select the color scheme you want and you’re done. Of course there is room for some small level of customization if you know a little about HTML, see my Twitter and del.icio.us widgets on the sidebar. However, there’s built-in support for Twitter and other services in some of the themes.
Posting is where tumblr really shines. When you want to create a new post, you are given a number of options:
- Text
- Photo
- Quote
- Link
- Chat
- Audio
- Video
Text is a basic blog post, like this one. Heavy on the text, maybe a few pictures and links throughout. Photo allows you to upload a photo or link to a photo somewhere else and place a caption. It formats the post in the blog specially for the photo.
Audio and Video are where it gets cool. If you choose audio, you can either upload an mp3 or link to an external audio file. Either way, tumblr automatically places a little flash mp3 player right in the post so people can listen without having to download the file. If you choose video and upload a video file, it will automatically send it to vimeo, convert it, put it in your vimeo account (required) and then embed it in your post. Or you can just put a link to a video on another site (say YouTube) and it will automatically embed it in the post.
The bottom line is that it makes posting a variety of formats quick, easy and painless. I’m busy and don’t want to have to mess around with formatting and options, I just want to get in, post, and get out.
Lifestream
What I found is that it’s still not that easy to find time to post. But, I still find time to go through my RSS feeds with Google Reader, bookmark with del.icio.us, watch videos on both YouTube and Vimeo, etc. I also discovered that out of the bullets at the top of this post, sharing was the one I was the most excited about.
This is where tumblr really shines. I have my tumblr set up so that when I ‘share’ an article on Google Reader, it automatically posts it in tumblr. The same thing happens when I ‘like’ a video on Vimeo or ‘favorite’ a video on YouTube. My Twitter stream is in the sidebar, as well as my most recent del.icio.us bookmarks.
My tumblr blog is a one stop shop. If you want to see what I’m doing on the internet, it all flows through here. You can still follow me and see what I’m doing directly on those other sites (I even provide links to my profiles on them in the sidebar). This has two advantages:
- Less pressure to always come up with a post.
- I only have to give people one address and they can find the rest from there.
In a way, it’s like I’m curating a little piece of the internet. Anything that find that seems relevant to edtech will flow here. tumblr also has some interesting social networking features that you can use with others on tumblr, but so far I haven’t really tapped into those yet.
All of that is well and nice, but I still think it is important to actually write posts. Without writing posts, I’m only fulfilling 1 out of the 4 reasons I started a blog. So consider this the first ‘real’ post on this blog, with at least 11 to come, and hopefully much, much more than that.
