winkchin:

sbeattie:

I’m pretty sure I don’t get this tumblr thing. But then, walled garden blog environments have always felt a little odd to me.

Well, one approach is this: http://www.rinich.com/post/358597818/i-love-walled-gardens

The thing to remember about the iPad as a device (and others of it’s ilk) is that it’s geared for consumption, not creation, which is fine as long as devices geared for creation are available. Heck, Archos and others are bringing out android based devices that look really tempting to me; the platform being of interest to me so that I can treat it as a closed, polished device if I want, but if I feel like hacking on it, it’s still open to me.

So fine, that non-walled blogging platforms exist is great and all, but if you are in your garden, I have to join or choose to not participate in your conversations. See below why I actually bothered to sign up with tumblr. So I don’t see the analogy to the closed nature of an iPad; that you choose to use a closed device like your iPod Touch has little impact on me other than that I can’t play scrabble-clone games with you (and I’m not even sure that’s true).

But what I’d really say is that Tumblr is no more a walled garden than Twitter. Indeed, I see Tumblr as multi-media long-form Twitter: reblogs = retweets; likes = favorites; the follow, following structure is the same; etc.

FYI, Twitter has lost a lot of its interest to me with its reply policy change, because I can no longer see one-sided conversations and jump in if you are talking to someone I don’t follow about a topic I might have something to say about. Unfortunately, identi.ca made some change to its api that none of the clients I’ve tried is able to parse, but if they were working, that’s where I’d spend the majority of my social media focus.

Combine the similarities to Twitter with the fact that the people I like to follow most on Twitter have also taken up residence in Tumblr…well, there’s a reason they’re called “social networks”, right?

The reason I’ve followed you onto tumblr is primarily because I really, really wanted to comment on your picky eater post, and couldn’t find a way to do so that didn’t involve registering for an account and associated blog. Alas, I didn’t stick to my principles, caved, and am helping tumblr gain content. Sigh.

That said, I still don’t think I’m doing it right, given that I haven’t seen my initial response show up as a comment or reference off of your original post.