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It started with a tweet, as so many things do. A friend of mine tweeted the link to a particularly funny photo blog. Following it, I found myself on a Tumblr blog, and I was immediately impressed with the simple, attractive platform and the sheer fun it seemed to exude. After some investigating I came to two conclusions:Tumblr is the future of blogging, and there must be a way to harness it for use in school.
What Is Tumblr?
Tumblr is a tumbleblog; a blog designed for short, quick entries that "tumble" onto the Web site as they are posted. This creates a blog that is more akin to a stream of consciousness than a series of carefully written statements. The site itself states that "if blogs are journals, than tumbleblogs are scrapbooks" (Meltzer 2010).
Changing the Way You Blog
What Tumblr offers is an unmatched ease of use. Creating an account, or a "main blog," requires three pieces of information: an email address, a password, and the URL for the new blog (e.g., newsweek.tumblr.com). There is no profile to fill out, no likes or dislikes to list, and nowhere to even enter a name. Because of this, there are also no ads or promotions filling the sidebars.
The Dashboard
All of the action in Tumblr takes place in the dashboard (see Figure 1, below). The main body of the dashboard is a running feed from an individual's posts and from those followed. The right sidebar contains information about the blog (see Figure 2, page 55): how many followers there are, how many posts have been made, etc. If a person has more than one blog, there is also a drop-down menu from which to choose the desired blog.
Across the top of the dashboard is the toolbar that makes Tumblr easy to use. There are seven icons representing the types of posts that can be made to a blog:
* Text - The traditional blog entry. While there is no word limit, these tend to be short.
* Photo - Photos can be posted alone or in groups. Photo size is limited to 10 MB.
* Quote - Sometimes it is desirable to share a great quote. This dashboard window asks only for the...