I'm Paul Jones

I've been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided that Tumblr just isn't what I need.

Don't get me wrong, the concept of Tumblr is brilliant. Different post types depending on what it is you want to post, each styled differently, and all easily postable. Sadly, whenever I got the urge to write a post, I saw the 'Link' option, added a couple of sentences to the description and boom, I've blogged, let's have a smoke break.

It made blogging so easy that I never actually blogged, strange as it sounds. I just fooled myself into thinking I was blogging.

Tumblr also seemed to focus too much on the presentation. There are some gorgeous Tumblr themes. So gorgeous, in fact, that I spent more time playing around with the theming API than I ever did posting. Compared to now, where I've got a pretty basic look-at-all-the-words theme that I've thrown together in an evening, and you can hopefully see the focus is on the content, not the packaging.

I came across this article that seems to sum up the form vs function argument pretty well, but I think he gets the conclusion wrong. He says Tumblr is beating Posterous because it's better designed, and I suppose he's right, but that's also why I didn't like it. It was so close to being good, but it just had a bit too much Twitter and bit too little blog. You can create a post by clicking one button. Tumblr will detect what kind of page you're on and create a new post that matches, so video for Youtube, photo for Flickr, etc.

I don't think creativity is something we should be simplifying, and that's my problem with Tumblr. I don't like the emphasis on reblogging (which is basically just posting someone else's content with an 'I agree!' or 'Me too!' attached) instead of creating new and interesting things to read or look at.

I wanted to get away from the complications of a full Wordpress style blogging system, but Tumblr just went too far in the other direction. Posterous seem to have got it just right, which is why I'll hopefully have that yellow tab in the top right for quite some time.