By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
Lots of people were getting on board with #adayinthelifeApril2 on Twitter today, so I took the opportunity to reboot my Trains Ruben Taketh blog, and snap the above photo.
At some point I'll upload more train photos from around the world, for now it's just a terrible site where I take photos of Sydney trains I've been on. As exciting as it sounds!
In a homage to Steve Rubel's verbosely titled Tumble post, I'm saying Why Adopting A Scorched Earth Policy, Dismantling Two Blogs and Jumping to Tumblr in a Single Weekend May Not Be Such a Good Idea.
It's a pun on a bank, and "chartered territory". I thought it was funny.
Firstly, despite its sudden transformation from a nerd site to a meme aggregator for alleged hipsters and teenage girls while I had my back turned, Steve is not the first well known blogger or journalist to move to Tumblr as their platform of choice. Robert Reich, a Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and whom I have much respect for, has been posting detailed entries on his Tumblr blog for years now. What makes Steve's move different from the others who preceded him is he's moved to the platform exclusively.
In his justification post, Steve claims he did this because "Tumblr is a truly unique hybrid" of many other media spheres such as blogs, traditional media and social media, and that essentially it gives him the best social bang for his buck.
It's highly social, with an incredibly engaged community and connective tissue to the aforementioned hubs. It offers most of the benefits of the large blog platforms (eg Owned media). And, last but not least, it is being used by dozens of traditional and tradigital [sic] media brands like TNW and Sports Blog Nation.
He does have a point. Mmm, pointy. I've had a Tumblr account since 2007 (used on and off!) and think it could teach traditional blog platform UI designers a thing or two. I like how easy it is to add entries to my favourites, and reblog something I find interesting. Frankly, I was so happy someone had the guts to rethink how blogs work, nobody had really done that since Radio.
We could discuss the reliability issues that have plagued the site worse than Twitter in 2007 and have sparked their own memes. Ah Richard Dawkins, if only you knew what you'd be unleashing with that term! My favourites of his works are Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker, but The Selfish Gene was also a delightfully thought provoking tome. But I digress!
What's most troubling about this move however is Tumblr is a silo. The real reason Steve didn't import his previous two blogs into Tumblr is because he couldn't. If he changes his mind in the future, he can't export [easily] either. To leave comments, you need to be in the Tumblr silo yourself. All these may seem like acceptable opportunity costs for access to a site that puts the dated UI of WordPress to shame, but what about the future?
His justification for deleting his previous two blogs bordered on the surreal!
I want to make it easy for Google. The only way to do so was to scorch the earth. Anything more will confuse it. I want one site to earn the +1s, not three.
So he was willing to contribute to the digital dark age, destroy hundreds of links and further give fuel to the traditional media folk who claim the internet is too transient a medium to be taken seriously, so maybe he can game (I'm sorry, "SEO") the current dominant search engine? I'm assuming he has local backups of his blog, but what about those of us who commented on his words in the past? What about those who cited him in research papers? At best it sounds short sighted, at worst irresponsible.
Forgive me for sounding a little like a conspiracy theorist, but I can't shake the feeling there's something else going on here. The cost of hosting a static version of a blog archive thesedays is a pittance, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence that having multiple sites "confuses" search engines; if anything I've seen more of the opposite.
I described the situation to a bloke at uni, and his immediate response was "so Tumblr gave him a wad of cash, did they?" and my old man dismissed the move as someone trying to cover their tracks for some reason, either through threat or enticement from a company or government based on something he said about them. I have no evidence of either of these, but it does seem like an awfully short sighted decision for someone who lives and breathes social media.
Perhaps he's right and I'm just not forward thinking enough to see the big picture; I wouldn't put it past me! Heck I'm even following him on Tumblr now. I wish him luck, and even more than I'm wrong!
To those who auto-post their Tumblr to Twitter: DON'T! Or make it fit in 140 characters. I hate constantly reading truncated ... tweets! If this means putting titles on your Tumblr entries like bloggers figured out how to do ten years ago, so be it.
I've resorted to filtering out all tweets that include "...", but I worry I'm missing some of your important commentary, such as this.
Your Twitter friend :)
~ Ruben(erd)
While I revel in this more traditional approach to blogging (when it works, looking at you WordPress), I do admit I'm jealous of how it easy it is for people on Tumblr to re-post entries from other tumblogs (that is the term, right?). Say... this one, for example!
Usually I would start reading up on a site's API, but with so many things to do right now I decided to take the easy way out given I'd only be using it in a personal context. Here's my idea:
How so? Ugh I hate rhetorical questions, mainly because I always need to consult a spell checker whenever I spell rhetorical.
For example, the picture of the girl above whom I can't stop looking at for some reason was saved on Tumblr as a gigantic PNG. What?! I know it could be saved as a JPEG and save a ton of space and bandwidth, but ImageMagick can't tell that from a diagram that should be kept as a PNG. In other words, it couldn't be an entirely automated process. Perhaps I could specify along with the URL I'm giving the script whether or not the images should be messed with. Ugh, but then it's not as automatic, which kinda defeats the purpose.
Secondly, Tumblr allows people to share far more than just pictures. If someone embedded a YouTube video or something else, what do I do then? I prefer hosting my own copies of stuff with attributions becuase I don't like relying on third party sites to stay alive. Why am I hearing Bee Gees all of a sudden? Ha, ha, ha, ha, staying alive... staying alive. Ha, ha, ha, ha, staying aliiiiiiive!
Thirdly, I shouldn't do this hack job and instead use the public APIs to get all the information I need and implement it in a WordPress plugin. It'd mean I'd have to actually learn PHP for real instead of just the hackish bits and pieces I've picked up from my Perl days and from maintaining MediaWiki and WordPress installs.
This entire post was an excuse to post that picture. I'm a sucker for eyes, and I'm lonely, shaddup.
A lot can happen when you're asleep! If you're on Twitter this is already ancient history because it happened hours ago, but Facebook came completely out of left field and bought FriendFeed. I agree with what Dave Winer said about it, that the deal can only be bad news for current FriendFeed users.
To use the technical social science language I have acquired from being a super 1337 online citizen for a while now, I have a Facebook account but they still kinda creep me out and this deal rubs me the wrong way. I hate the idea of general purpose gated communities where you have to log in to access material, and while there's no evidence Facebook will simply swallow FriendFeed into people's profile page news feeds to be never seen on the public internet again, it is a possibility. Even if they don't do that, I'm sure we can look forward to some new archaic and scary terms of service.
While I had most of the feeds for my online activities connected to it, I never really used FriendFeed itself for anything except for one time quite recently. I'm thinking I'll move all my feeds onto my neglected Tumblr account and ditch FriendFeed.
One of the people commenting on the FriendFeed blog about the decision said part of the reason he liked FriendFeed was that it was a social network that wasn't Facebook! Oh well, back to Twitter for short messages which fortunately was spared.
Such rich world problems we worry ourselves with.
My good friend Felix had started his own Tumblr weblog which looks really slick and is full of random good stuff!
ASIDE: I almost typed the word friend as fiend: would have meant something slightly different!
ASIDE: I'm currently listening to Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes. As I typed in Tumblr, she sang "she'll take a TUMBLE on you!" If that isn't a synchronicity, then I'm a mozzarella ball.
I thought if Tumblr was good enough to meet Felix's quite stringent standards I figured I might as well give it a shot myself. As I eventually found out with services like del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and Truemors, I don't feel as though I have much of a use for it now, but it might grow on me. Actually come to think of it then, maybe I shouldn't start another addiction!
From the Tumblr Help page:
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.
For the time being I've just got my own Tumblr literally posting directly from my Flickr, del.icio.us, Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog web feeds. I also post random quotes that I find, because one line posts wouldn't really be that appropriate on a site like this, plus doggone it I really like quotes.
If you're using a screen reader or text based browser, the description in the picture above is:
A cheap imitation in design and spirit of my good friend Felix Tanjono’s Tumblr weblog!
My Tumblr can be found at rubenerd.tumblr.com, and Felix's is at ftanjono.tumblr.com.