Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the up and rising blogging tools that has been recognized not only as a success but as a trend-setter. Its good reviews ranges from Forbes.com, CNET.com, to the New York Times. Tumblr introduced "micro-blogging" or "tumble blogging" as the newest way to blog. UK telegraph says it's like what text messaging is to emails-short, to the point, and direct.

Tumblr allows users to post texts, photos, quotes, links, musics, and videos from internet browsers, phones, desktops, laptops, emails, and pretty much everywhere else possible. It allows a great deal of customization for the users, from choosing basic visual elements like colors to setting themes for your blog page. One of the unique features of Tumblr is its reblogging capability. Reblogging is similiar to the embedding function of Youtube. You can extract a post from someone else's Tumblr page and "reblog" it on your page. This is essentially the key to making anything and everything viral.

I've chosen a specific blog that was recommended on the Tumblr homepage: 52books ( http://52books.tumblr.com/). This blog is written by a woman named Laura and she shares her yearlong reading plans with her readers. Right when I clicked the link of her blog, I was blown away by the customization.

Her homepage is formatted like a book with tabs, which is what you may often see with the books that people read. The second thing I noticed was how clean the page was. Everything that was important was automatically presented right in front of me, with no irrelevant details like ads or links.

In two of her posts, she was able to attach an image and also an audio file for her viewers to look at and listen to. Laura has also attached Youtube clips in her other posts.

One of my personal favorite functions of Tumblr and as seen in Laura's blog is the quoting function. Rather than simply using regular text and use quotation marks, Tumblr's quoting functionality gives the quote an authentic feel and almost poetic to me. Although this can probably be easily achieved using regular text, it's convenient to have the functionality fit in. When any blogger uses the quoting functionary, it stands out among all the posts the blogger has written and catches the reader's eyes.

Many bloggers, like Laura, uses Tumblr to have the best visual capability and technology for their blogs. Unlike other blogging tools, irrelevant links and ads are completely unseen in Laura's blog. This shows that bloggers have the flexibility to choose what they would like to show on their blog page. Laura's blog was clean, concise, and visually appealing through the use of pictures, quotes, audio, and videos.