Broadcasting Brain

Tumblelogs… what to do with them?

Tumblelogs, such as Tumblr, are used to quickly assemble a stream of links, text, images, etc. Tumblelogs harken back to some of the original intent of weblogs - sharing links to interesting, useful, or cool websites with an application that is also faster and easier to learn that the standard blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, or Moveable Type.

The thing is, once you’re used to using one of these other blogging platforms and dabbling in HTML/CSS a bit, you might not be inclined to use a tumblelog. There’s a tradeoff: while you gain ease of use, you lose some of the flexibility and customization power that you get from traditional blogging platforms.

I use a Tumblr account to track certain items for future reference but I have at least two other bookmarking means to do that:

• StumbleUpon
• Deli.cio.us

This week I thought of a different idea for using a tumblelog and I thought I’d share it with you.

I’m using this tumblelog (powered by Soup.io) to act as a portfolio of guest posts that I’ve written for other blogs. It took me less than one hour to set up the tumblelog with links to my guest posts, as well as some formatting of the basic tumblelog template to get the look that I wanted.

I’ve changed the My Writing page of my blog to refer to the tumblelog and removed the original text entries.

Now that I’ve set it up, here are the possible benefits and disadvantages of using a tumblelog for this job:

Pros of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• I don’t have to update my own blog anymore whenever I write a guest post; I just add it to the tumblelog.
• It’s very easy to add the links to the tumblelog.
• If a potential employer wants to see samples of my blog writing, I can just give them the link to the tumblelog.

Cons of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• The tumblelog template isn’t as flexible or powerful as I might like.
• It encourages readers to click out of my blog when, ideally, I’d like to keep them there.

Next steps

I’m going to try using the tumblelog as my portolio for one month and see how it goes. If the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I’ll expand the concept to some other writing.

What do you think? Do you have any innovative uses for tumblelogs? Why not share them with the rest of us?

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