Serendipity35

Tumblr (with no final vowel in the Flickr 2.0 way) is a tumblelog. A tumblelog is a variation of a blog. It's for short-form, mixed-media posts rather than longer editorial-style posts that you might generally associate with blogging.

So is this blogging for short attention span readers and writers?

There's some of that, and I'm unsure about my feelings towards the quick-format 2.0 type tools that are appearing now. I use instant messaging infrequently and it can be useful or just fun, though I sometimes find myself IMing a friend and then just picking up the phone in the middle of it to have a "real" conversation. I check into my Facebook a few times a week, but not every day, so the tool that allows me to say my "status update" gets stale quickly. For kids who are online 24/7, these posts that say "out to get dinner" or "in class -text me" serve some purpose, but it's not for me.

There's much buzz about apps like Twitter out there that allow you very quickly add some small comment, link, photo to a web space and then share it with everyone or a group of "friends."

Tumblelogs like Tumblr include links, photos, quotes, more traditional postings, and video. People frequently use them to share their own content from other sites, plus things they have discovered while surfing. The latter use is not unlike bookmarking though using a site like del.icio.us, you would not really embed a photo or video but simply add a bookmark to it somewhere else. One blogger I read made the analogy: if blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

Does a Tumblr account offer any educational value? It probably can be used by a teacher. What it does offer is a way to create an organized web place that is very easy to add content from different sources (both your own and others). You could create one for a project or presentation. It certainly lowers the learning curve for non-techies. Now I said that teachers could create one, but it would be better if your students created them. You can decide/deal with any issues of privacy or access to photos and such from your school.

I created one in about two minutes. You create a URL (choose wisely: short, memorable, meaningful). My sample one is http://ronk.tumblr.com. Right now I have it pulling content from one of my Flickr photo accounts, some YouTube videos that I have collected in an account, posts from my poetry blog, and posts from this blog as text. I could also post content from my phone (but you may know, I'm not a big cell phone fan). There are several design themes to choose from and I'm sure more will be added. Supposedly, these display pretty well on mobile devices.

It's still new and there are some things I'd like to see added: I'd like to be able to shuffle the sequence of the posts, upload audio files, perhaps allow comments, and be able to modify the designs.