Newley Purnell

Tumblr is a free blogging platform that makes posting material — whether it’s images, audio, video, links, or text — extremely easy.

Because I’m interested in all things Web publishing-related, I’ve set up an experimental tumblr page — er, tumblelog — at newley.tumblr.com. I don’t know if I’ll continue to updating it or not, but I’d heard a lot about the service and wanted to give it a spin.

At the expense of sounding ridiculous to those of you who — quite understandably — could care less about the technical minutia of a typical blogging workflow, I’ll just say this: The platform offers a great way to share interesting digital snippets that aren’t quite right for Twitter’s 140-character maximum length and yet might not justify a full-length blog post. In addition, items can be posted to tumblr extremely quickly — as in a matter of seconds.

Some disparate items I’ve posted to tumbler over the last few weeks include:

– A somewhat silly (and quite clearly impromptu), two-minute, 26-second audio recording I made in a taxi in Kolkata, India last November.

– This striking image of a daring motorcycle design.¹

– A YouTube video of a financial reporter explaining the economic meltdown (yes, I’m still fixated on how best to explain the subprime crisis).

Some people use tumblr for minimalist photo blogs, while others, such as my friend Lee, use them to aggregate their various online postings (images from Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, etc.).

I’m unsure how — or even if — I’ll continue using tumblr, but I thought it might be of interest to some of you out there who’re looking for an ultra-simple way to share material online.

Further reading:

Lifehacker: “Geek to Live: Instant, no-overhead blog with Tumblr”

“I don’t have the time to keep it up.”

“I don’t have that much to say that often.”

These are the reasons most people abandon their personal weblog or never start one. But we all come across interesting tidbits online every day that we want to remember and share - links, photos, videos, even that side-splitting IM session you had with your co-worker. A new blog format, called a “tumblelog,” is a no-hassle, no-writing-required way to share those bits and maintain a personal site with the least possible commitment.

Webmonkey: “Get Started with Tumblr”

Do you miss the days when blogging seemed simple and exciting? Have you ever stared at the blank text input field in WordPress until you began to fill with dread?

While WordPress, Movable Type and similar blogging engines certainly make it easy to set up a blog with a robust content management system, sometimes the software itself is overkill. Sometimes you just want to post a picture or a quick snippet of text and be done with it.

That’s more or less the thinking that inspired Tumblr, a dead simple blogging system that makes it easy to post a quick note, an image, a link or a YouTube video and then get on with your real life.

1. Motorcycling-related link worth checking out: Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [↩]

From the world’s greatest journeys to blogging geekery to funny accents, here’s a list of some material I’ve been enjoying online over the past months but haven’t had time to link to until now:

Travel:
– Wanderlust: GOOD magazine “maps out history’s greatest journeys, from Magellan to Kerouac”

– World Hum interview: “Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train”

– Mashable.com: “25+ Tools for a Road Trip 2.0″

Blogging:
– ReadWriteWeb: “The Future of Blogging Revealed”

– 10,000Words.net: “15 Journalists’ outstanding personal sites”

– Merlin Mann: “What Makes for a Good Blog?”

– Chris Brogan: “A Sample Blogging Workflow”

Audio recording and radio journalism:
– The Freesound Project: “a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds”

– Transom.org: “Remote Recording Survival Guide”

Just for Fun:
– “Can You Guess Where My Accent is From?”

– “Average Athlete vs Olympic Athlete”

– Calaboca.com: “Bacilos - Sin Verguenza,” a post about an album from one of my favorite bands. (Aside: Best track from this album — with silly lip syncing fan vid: “Pasos de Gigante.”)

– Where We Do What We Do: pics of work spaces. And nothing more.