Tumblr

A friend of my brother sent over an email asking for some advice on picking a blogging host/platform. He sent it to me because I’m a ‘blogger’, even though I consider myself to be nothing of the sort :).

I’m just a guy who likes to write words in a semi-public place, which is something I’ve been doing since a couple of years into college. Back then I was using some crazy little site called xanga, which (for those of you that don’t know) was/is basically an online frat party for asian people… kidding… only slightly. It was/is really a livejournal for asian people.

Back then I didn’t consider myself to be any kind of a ‘blogger’ and I certainly don’t today. To me the term ‘blogger’ really only refers to online writers who use a blogging platform to write and are actively trying to procure a larger readership. In other words, they have journalistic and/or commercial intent. Me? I just like to type about a wide variety of things that have little connection to one another besides being interesting to me.

What would I do differently if I was to be a ‘blogger’?

Well, mostly I would probably be a lot more focused in my writing. I’d center around a central theme. Sometimes you read a blogger you don’t know who has no core topic (i.e. dooce or something like that), but usually you don’t.

I’d also write just about every day (instead of “whenever the fuck I feel like it”) and I certainly wouldn’t use cuss words (like I just did). I also wouldn’t ramble and would write succinctly, which is a real problem when you really just use your ‘blog’ as a dumping ground to spew random unconnected thoughts in a pretty free form way… where was I again?

Luckily for my brother’s friend though, I have become a bit knowledgeable about different blogging platforms though. That comes from being an original xanga user, switching over to blogger (smallchou.blogspot.com), trying out wordpress.com, using the free trial typepad account to import all my posts while blogger beta sucked (sorry, Six Apart) for the express purpose of, finally, arriving at Wordpress on my asmallorange.com web hosting account today.

So after all that, what did I suggest to him? Well I mentioned all of those, but I also mentioned a site called Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com). It’s a great little site and I think it’s perfect for a lot of folks I know. The focus isn’t on writing structured posts that feel very formal. The focus is on clipping little things and sharing them with people, no matter where you are. It’s really simple and it’s fun. To me, they will have succeeded when they have the feel of a community like xanga. It’s just the type of technology that is easy enough to possibly bring all those people who got tired of xanga/lj back to online writing/posting.

It’s not anything intense like ‘blogging’, it’s just writing and sharing online again.