Irony: Definition
aatw:
So yesterday in #tumblrs we were having a heated debate about whether Tumblr is suited for long-form posts. My stance, as was made clear when Simen quoted me, was that while I love reading long posts and articles, I don’t think Tumblr is the right place for them.
Maybe a tumblelog in general is suited for long text posts, I don’t know. But the way Tumblr has evolved with the Dashboard and Reblogging, I don’t see it as a blogging network/engine. I love opening up my Dashboard and quickly flipping through images, short video clips (when do you ever see long videos on Tumblr?), songs, et al. Sure, no one’s saying you can’t use Tumblr for commentary or long-form posts. By all means, go ahead. I love seeing people use Tumblr for different things and in creative ways (Rod using it to post humorous updates about and from the point of view of his baby, for example). But if everyone I followed were to use Tumblr to post relatively lengthy commentary with each link, as Richard does, I probably wouldn’t use the Dashboard to browse through new posts everyday. I would subscribe to those sites in my RSS reader, as I do with all blogs I follow.
At one point the debate switched over to John Gruber’s site, Daring Fireball. The following is an e-mail I sent Gruber:
[…]
Do you think of your Linked List and Articles as two separate sections of your site (a combination of which is shown on your homepage) or merely two categories of a single blog?His reply:
From 2002-2004, I only published articles. When I started the Linked List in 2004, I did sort of think of it as a second blog. In fact, by default, the home page still only showed articles for about a year. You had to go to daringfireball.net/prefs to set a cookie to show everything on the home page.
Now, though, I think of it as a single weblog, with two types of entries.
-J.G.
