Follow These Tumblrs

I hate Follow Friday on Twitter, I really do. Everyone who I add or who adds me is usually terrible, not at all related to my interests and spends all day talking about how much they want to blow Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.

So while I would now never participate in followfriday on Twitter, I enjoy the following tumblelogs and I think you will too.

• juliasegal
• generic1
• maeby
• pinstripebindi
• bobloblawslawblog
• semiserious

laurishly:

“Tumblr is to Twitter what Vimeo is to Youtube - full of more creative innovative people, but ultimately less popular.” — whatpriceprogress

Uhhhh tumblr and twitter aren’t even remotely alike. It annoys me when people compare the two. That’s like comparing facebook to LastFM.  Tumblr and perhaps livejournal would be more accurate. Just saying.

I see your point here, Lauren but I will respectfully disagree. Tumblr and Live Journal have similar functionality but were always used in very different ways.  Most LiveJournals (Circa 2003, when we were all on it) were used like actual journals. People wrote long posts about their lives a few times a week and everybody commented to cheer them up, piss them off, whatever.

For me, Tumblr has always been about short-form communications you feel compelled to share. Postcards from rotting our minds away on the internet for hours at a time, if you will. If someone writes something long and crazy about their life on here, I think most of us skim the first few lines and continue scrolling down the dashboard. (For the record, yes, I understand the irony of creating the very thing I say doesn’t exist on here.)

Most of us who’ve made friends on here do so over time and from literally following someone’s manic tastes and opinions over time. Very little of what we say on here provides any window into who I am if you look at it out of context. This is where I think Twitter and Tumblr resemble each other the most. When people chide twitter for being about eating sandwiches and being drunk, they certainly aren’t wrong, but they miss the greater point that all of the aggregate minutiae communicate certain truths about people that no other medium can.

In conclusion, twitter and tumblr = short-form medium (that works great on your cell phone), livejournal = long-form medium you probably won’t want to read in line at the supermarket. But hey, I do agree that the original Vimeo-Tumblr comparison that started my rant is not valid at all.

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