It’s amazing what people spend time on out there on the ‘net. I like to think that everything I do on ThePete.Com (or any other site) represents something I’m truly passionate about. So, imagine the confusion and mild disgust that formed in my brain while stumbling across a handful of sites at blog hosting service Tumblr.com.

First off, Mac people only wish they were this elitist.

Check out what Tumblr.com’s FAQ page says a “Tumblelog” is:

To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.

You can find more information on Wikipedia.

So, they’re not “Tumblr Blogs” even though the site that you create these blogs on is called “Tumblr.com.” And then, what IS a “Tumblelog”? Their description is kind of odd, since, through the magic of hyperlinks and these things called “tags,” my WordPress blog is very much already a scrapbook of my life, so knowing how a “Tumblelog” is more like a scrapbook and less like a regular blog would be nice. Sadly, nowhere on the FAQ do they tell you, only mentioning (as above) that we should go to their Wikipedia article to learn more.

Wow. Imagine if someone sat down for a TV interview but answered everything in vague advertising propaganda terms and when pressed referred the reporter to their Wikipedia entry.

Why have a FAQ at all? Why not just link to the damn Wikipedia?

But I don’t give up that easily, I like “simple” and “elegant” (even with the quotes) so, I decided to check out some of the “featured” “Tumblelogs.”

The very first thing I noticed about tumblelog.marco.org is that in the sidebar he’s got excerpts from his regular blog which ALL look more interesting than the entries in his tumblelog. There are pictures and they seem to have meat to them. The entries in the tumblelog are all very short and kind of bleak. Here is a sampling:

Bug in Excel 2007 Microsoft Excel 2007 has a serious bug in simple arithmetic calculations that should produce 65535. The simplest example is 850 x 77.1, which results in 10000 instead of 65535. (thanks Anmar)

…

I am against comments on Tumblr. Why? Because Tumblr is a site for tumblelogs. The tumblelog is a beautifully simple medium. One of the wonders of the simplicity is the lack of a commenting system. [...] Why would you throw all kinds of extra crap onto a medium that exists for it’s simplicity? WordPress is free. Textpattern is free. Symphony is free. Livejournal is free. Blogger is free. There are so many other platforms to blog with. Why duct tape comments onto a tumblelog?

— pixelspread: Tumblr Comments

…

How to operate email
1. Don’t use auto-responders.

2. Absolutely don’t use those stupid systems that send me a verification email and make me fill out a CAPTCHA before they send the message to you. It may stop spam, but it also stops legitimate messages while frustrating and inconveniencing people who try to email you. Your spam is your problem, not mine.

…

Lemur CATTA Read, comprehend, comment.

…

Rands In Repose: The Button How to operate each personality type in a job interview.

…

Every few days Twitter stops working, and tells me “Features and improvements are on the way!” Well, you know what would be an improvement? Staying online!

— Cameron

…

What all this come’s down to is the sense of a nation absolutely fooling itself that it can carry on in the way it is used to. I’m hardly an advocate of the US giving up and committing suicide. What I advocate is a broad recognition that reality is compelling us to change our behavior. Reality is trying to tell us that we can’t run an economy based on nothing more than investment schemes without directing investment into activities that produce things of value. Reality is telling us to be very worried about living arrangements that can only function with copious imports of oil from people who are disgusted with us. Reality is telling us that we can’t divert our food crops into making motor fuels without people becoming unable to afford either fuel or food. Reality is telling us to redirect our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people and less toward things-we-do-with-new-things. Reality is telling us to shift from avoidance behavior and denial to engaging with reality in order to lead lives that are consistent with reality.

— Jim Kunstler (thanks AZspot)

…

C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

— Linus Torvalds (thanks Anmar)

the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks (thanks Topherchris)

…

But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.
It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.

— Why I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails (thanks Contrived Chaos and Dalas Verdugo – and yes, that was me who removes unnecessary numbers from blog-post titles)

Hopefully, that’s enough to make my point–kind of depressing, overly critical stuff. Sure, not everyone must blog about the United States as a police state and this is supposed to be a “tumblelog” but I’m just not seeing anything unique about this thing aside from the fact that almost every post contains very little original content and only contains the (kind of selfish) mini-rant about how something sucks. Now, I know I blog about depressing stuff that sucks all the time, but the point is, why do it in this format? Seems, so far, that Tumblr is more a place that encourages you to grab textual soundbites from others. The fact that these are all fairly judgmental, negative quotes goes to the personality of Marco, I would think. But again, it’s funny how his regular blog looks way more interesting than his tumblelog.

There’s nothing overtly obnoxious about Blogable.net. At first glance, it’s just a blog fairly short entries, again, featuring very little original content and links to other stories. The catch is, they’re all links to stories on Digg. Lately, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with Digg Whoring. Digg Whoring is when you beg people to Digg your blog posts to make them more popular. Blogable.net seems to exist only to make it’s posts more popular. There is more to life than being popular, you know.

Next up, I looked at Tumbl.us. The unifying quality of tumblelogs is definitely having little-to-no original content. Tumble.us has more pictures that the other tumblelogs but they aren’t accompanied by much. While not as negative as tumblelog.Marco.org, these are pretty judgmental. Check out this post on tumblelog etiquette which is basically just a quote from our pal Marco from earlier:

Dear Internet,

I loved this little rant by Marco. I do hate the term tumblrblog. I hate when people can’t say tumblelog. Sometimes I feel like no one says anything outloud anymore. Like whoever named thoof…

“It’s “tumblelog”. Pronounce it like the complete word “tumble” followed by the complete word “log”. No gaps, emphasis on “tum”.

The following alternatives are all wrong and awkward:

- Tumblr blog
- tumble blog
- tumblog

Also, the correct present participle is “tumblelogging”.

I recognize that it doesn’t take much skill to publish on the internet, but please make an effort to get your terminology right, even if the rest of your article is completely wrong.

Thanks,
Marco”

Yeah, sounds like Marco to me.

But sheesh–what’s the big effing deal whether people call them “tumble blogs” or “tumblelogs” or “TUMblogs”? Why the RULES?

Finaly, I checked out Anarchia.org, the site that claims to be the very first tumblelog, and it was actually kind of cool. Maybe it was the site’s mix of pictures and text, or the fact that the author does include personal commentary, or perhaps it was that the author wasn’t clearly a dick about things in each post. I think the fact that author seemed to be trying to make the blogiverse a better place with his posts also might have something to do with me liking it. That’s something I try to do, too. Sometimes I’m pull it off, other times not.

In the end, it seems like Tumblr.com seems to encourage a lack of thought, a quick judgment that results in posts that lack a whole lot of information or perspective. Sure, we can find that elsewhere, but why spend time being shallow, short and judgemental?

Yes, I know I’m being judgmental by judging them, but I’m, at least, trying to be constructive about it.

In the meantime, you can judge for yourself by checking out the sites I mention. Here they are again for easy reference:

Tumblelog.Marco.Org
Blogable.Net
Tumble.US
Anarchaia.Org (recommended)

Will I sign up for a Tumblr Blog? Probably, just to see if the plague hits me, too…

Oh and for the record, if you make comments optional on Tumblr each Tumblr blogger can decide for themselves if they want them instead of this odd Greek-forum-style democracy. I just LOVE it when a handful of people get together and decide what’s right for everyone else.