I often get the question: “what’s the difference between Tumblr and WordPress?”
Tumblr (short for Tumblog) is much like WordPress: also a web-based blogging platform, also free. The main difference is that people who tend to keep WordPress blogs write more, whereas Tumblrs are better suited to multi-media blogs: photos and video.
One of my favorite applications of Tumblr is its connection to Instagram. Instagram is a great iPhone app that combines photography and a social network. You download the app, and then take a photo with it. It has various filters for your photo that give it cool special effects and make it look old, etc… You then share your photo with the people that follow you on Instagram, and you can see the photos of people that you follow, all straight from your iPhone.
You can connect your Tumblr (and Twitter and Facebook, too) directly to your Instagram account, so that every time you post a new photo, it gets posted as a new blog post on your Tumblr.
My friend Geoff and I have often had the conversation about how Twitter is killing the blogosphere. It’s so easy to write a tweet–short, sweet, speedy–whereas sitting down to write blog posts 5 times a week is a huge investment of time. And we have short attention spans.
I don’t know if Twitter is really killing the blogosphere–it seems to be alive and well to me, but this recent article on SMedio might leave you questioning that.
Tumblr recently overtook WordPress in terms of numbers of accounts, despite the fact that Tumblr has not been around for as long as WordPress.
From the article:
Don’t look now, but Tumblr is poised to emerge as the next great Internet sensation, right behind Twitter. Tumblr has only been around since 2007, but now hosts over 20 million micro blogs, and boasts 9.2 million daily page views. There’s more. Tumblr’s popularity has been accelerating at breakneck speed, and all signs point to continued growth. Why has Tumblr become so popular, so fast? It may have something to do with our short attention spans and our embracing of short texts and tweets as our primary means of social communication. In addition, Tumblr offers a fun and easy platform to establish an online presence that’s an appealing blog, Twitter-like, social networking hybrid. It’s blogging, but without the commitment. Tumblr is a diverse social community that relies on short bursts of text, photos and video to communicate with the world. It’s much more visual than your average blog. And it’s catching on big time.
What do you think? I’d love to hear from both sides.
h/t: @thereseljoseph