ALERT THE FLEET!

dailymeh:

I can’t help it: I always bite on this stuff. This is just fantastic (via):

There’s such a distinct lack of text content on Tumblr that breaks even 100 words in a post, it’s pretty sad… Tumblr, support your writers. Help add a text element to this picture-heavy platform that we have here.

Cue dozens of people going back and forth about how to use Tumblr, what it’s for, &c. This discussion is cyclic. Everything I said then holds now: there’s no one true way! There’s no one true way to blog, to use Tumblr, to live your fucking life. Don’t tell me how to do what I do! There’s room for many approaches, and some of them, frankly, will suck, but that’s life. I’ve built up a pretty decent audience doing the complete opposite of what half of the people in this discussion say the blogging platform I’ve chosen is for; I know there are others who have built enormous audiences doing the complete opposite of what I’m doing. That’s fine! It’s just a blogging platform, people. We choose how to use the tools we’re given, and you have to be pretty small-minded not to see that there is a huge variety of things you can do with those tools.

The best response to this whole discussion, of course, would be to produce some kick-ass content in your chosen form. That would prove to anyone who’s got half a head that this blogging platform can be used for whatever it is you’re doing, and hey, everyone likes kick-ass content. That’s what I intend to do, but I can’t resist writing this post, too.

Maybe these problems stem from the fact that people don’t see Tumblr as a blogging platform, but as a community. It’s both. I try to treat it as the former, because I don’t want this to be “a tumblr”, I want it to be a blog, and I don’t want to reach just “tumblr people”, I want to reach the internet in general. But if you take two seconds to look at the Tumblr dashboard, it’s obvious that it’s got all the tools you need to do any or all of the following:

• Post long text-only essays.
• Make an online photo gallery.
• Keep a link blog.
• Share your favorite music.
• Make a log of good quotes you found.
• Do a webcomic.
• Keep a log of what clothes you wore today, what you ate for dinner, or when you took a crap. Or none or all of those.
• Make a gimmick website: a collection of hipsters, vintage video game title screens, sad stock brokers, pets that look like they want to kill themselves, boner-worthy things, things that remind you of the ’60s/70s/80s/90s, webcomics devoted to removing one of the main characters of a well-known comic, front pages of major US newspapers, and so on.
• Review literature/music/websites.
• Tell your mom to upload shit to Tumblr instead of forwarding you fifteen chain emails a day.
• Make a feed of self-portraits. With or without beer.
• Share poems.
• Chronicle teenage angst, or anonymously confess your love for friends/coworkers/celebrities/that hot girl on the commute.
• Dissect Tumblr, on Tumblr.
• Prove your worth as a Social & Viral Marketing Scientist.
• Share your favorite Youtube/Vimeo videos. Or share your own videos.
• Put photos you like on this space so you don’t have to message people you know (or strangers) OMG LOOK AT THIS PHOTO and they will look and say “it’s a book on a school desk with light streaming on it, and most of this shit is blurry, why do you waste my time on this?” and totally not get it.
• Archive buildings you would own or houses you would live in if you had a billion on the books.
• Take a quote, slap it over a vague photograph, and get 1,000 reblogs.
• Share recipes.
• Idolize pretty women with big boobs. Or metrosexual twentysomething lead stars in teenage romance tv series.
• Bait a book deal and get one.
• Philosophize.
• Disgust your readers.
• Memes, memes, memes.
• Preach the fact that JESUS LOVES YOU.
• Spam. Also, see directly above.
• Share the latest in science. Or art. Or penis rings.
• Practice your Basque/Japanese/English/Swahili.
• Combine song lyrics rendered in artful typography with the song in question in mp3 format that you can listen to.
• Create a portfolio.
• Write a mixed-media tumblelog that mixes all of the above.

Need I go on? Almost all of the above I have seen people actually do, and if not, I know how I’d do it if I wanted to. Who are you to tell me I can’t, shouldn’t, or should be doing more of any of that?

Basically I think everyone ought to read this.