TUMBLR DASHBOARD? this one’s for the tumblr community. to you, i pose a question: How do you use the Dashboard? as you probaby know, the Dashboard of your tumblr site is the main method for posting to your tumblr blog (deal, sticklers - i call it a tumblr blog). it’s easy and clean and awesome and can be credited with much of the success of tumblr. however, the Dashboard can also be used as a way of browsing the posts of other tumblr users. every tumblr blog has an ‘Add to friends’ button which allows you to collect your favorite tumblr blogs in your account, much like a social network. once you’ve added some friends to your account and activated the ‘Show their posts’ feature, the latest posts of your friends will show up in your Dashboard, interspersed throughout your own. now, i was under the impression that nobody really used this feature until i saw some video of someone using it for this purpose. i use the phrase ‘like a social network’ because tumblr isn’t, at its core, a social network. there is no message/mail system in place for communicating with the friends you accumulate, other than Adding them and linking and/or shouting out to them in your own blog. there is no way of sharing only with your friends, there’s no way of direct messaging. i do use the ‘Add to friends’ button from time to time. i use it to kind of collect the tumblr blogs i find interesting, and to give a thumbs-up to the tumblr user, in case they happen to be insecure and hungry for appreciation like i am. but i don’t use it to read friends’ posts in my own tumblr site. if i like a tumblr blog, i subscribe to its RSS feed and read it in NetNewsWire. to me, this is a way of treating a tumblr blog with the same respect as a more traditional blog. just because i don’t want to deal with Wordpress shouldn’t mean i am less of a blogger. while there are social networking aspects to the ‘Add to friends’ feature, it is unlike a social networking app in that 1) i’m not asked or told when someone adds me as a friend (the only way to know is to compulsively check) and 2) i’m not able to see what tumblr blogs other users have as friends (which could actually be useful in finding tumblr blogs to read, as is the case with Twitter, the microblogging app). i’ll admit, i do keep tabs on the users that have friended me. vanity dictates that i do, much like a myspace or a facebook. just yesterday, i posted a photo i’d found on a plastic surgery site - something that i found funny, if mildly offensive. within 2 minutes, my friend counter was down 1. i panicked and removed the post (which in hindsight, was probably a good idea - if you’re curious, i could share it with you) but i wonder if in this case, the one social networking aspect of tumblr had a negative impact on my blogging? so again, i pose the question, to those who care to respond: How do you use the Dashboard?

TUMBLR DASHBOARD?

this one’s for the tumblr community. to you, i pose a question: How do you use the Dashboard?

as you probaby know, the Dashboard of your tumblr site is the main method for posting to your tumblr blog (deal, sticklers - i call it a tumblr blog). it’s easy and clean and awesome and can be credited with much of the success of tumblr.

however, the Dashboard can also be used as a way of browsing the posts of other tumblr users. every tumblr blog has an ‘Add to friends’ button which allows you to collect your favorite tumblr blogs in your account, much like a social network. once you’ve added some friends to your account and activated the ‘Show their posts’ feature, the latest posts of your friends will show up in your Dashboard, interspersed throughout your own.

now, i was under the impression that nobody really used this feature until i saw some video of someone using it for this purpose. i use the phrase ‘like a social network’ because tumblr isn’t, at its core, a social network. there is no message/mail system in place for communicating with the friends you accumulate, other than Adding them and linking and/or shouting out to them in your own blog. there is no way of sharing only with your friends, there’s no way of direct messaging.

i do use the ‘Add to friends’ button from time to time. i use it to kind of collect the tumblr blogs i find interesting, and to give a thumbs-up to the tumblr user, in case they happen to be insecure and hungry for appreciation like i am. but i don’t use it to read friends’ posts in my own tumblr site. if i like a tumblr blog, i subscribe to its RSS feed and read it in NetNewsWire. to me, this is a way of treating a tumblr blog with the same respect as a more traditional blog. just because i don’t want to deal with Wordpress shouldn’t mean i am less of a blogger.

while there are social networking aspects to the ‘Add to friends’ feature, it is unlike a social networking app in that 1) i’m not asked or told when someone adds me as a friend (the only way to know is to compulsively check) and 2) i’m not able to see what tumblr blogs other users have as friends (which could actually be useful in finding tumblr blogs to read, as is the case with Twitter, the microblogging app).

i’ll admit, i do keep tabs on the users that have friended me. vanity dictates that i do, much like a myspace or a facebook. just yesterday, i posted a photo i’d found on a plastic surgery site - something that i found funny, if mildly offensive. within 2 minutes, my friend counter was down 1. i panicked and removed the post (which in hindsight, was probably a good idea - if you’re curious, i could share it with you) but i wonder if in this case, the one social networking aspect of tumblr had a negative impact on my blogging?

so again, i pose the question, to those who care to respond: How do you use the Dashboard?

Oct 15 2007 12:05pm
Birdhouse — A notepad for Twitter