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Using Tumblr as a Personal Aggregator

One of the things I’ve been looking at in the last week or so is the Tumblr service. There’s a rash of ‘mini-blog’ tools coming online at the moment such as Twitter and Jaiku (but they do have the mobile phone angle). Tumblr is much more focused on ‘pure’ blogging in the short form, bt it also has a number of ‘capture’ operations that allow it to take content from other RSS feeds.

Tumblr Screencap of Ewan Spence’s Aggregator

So I’ve set up my Tumblr page (http://ewanspence.tumblr.com/) to act as an aggregator for all my sites, posts, and podcasts. It does turn it into a rather ’set up and forget’ site but that’s fine by me. I don;t want to have to think of another site when I sit down to do some commenting on the world’s affairs.

My worry in all of these little tools are twofold. The first is the locking up of my words in other services. Yes there’s always ways to get them out (for example the archiving of Flickr pictures to a DVD) but when my content sits on another service, they have to be making some money somewhere to keep the service running. Very very rarely does that flow back to the members.

The second is the dilution of the personal brand – with so many bits and pieces of someone all over the net you have to try and work hard to have a central place to et everything. That’s where the personal blog comes in, and you’ll note that the re-design on EwanSpence.com has pushed the longer articles from myself, but tie-ing in through RSS feeds links around the web (Clipmarks) and links to my podcasts and Flickr pics in the bottom bar.

Where does Tumblr fit in? Well it gets the icon in the Web 2.0 bookmark strip of icons, but rest assured nothing ‘new’ is going on Tumblr, it’s mroe a case of reserving my name in the service rather than anything else.

April 29, 2007; About My Sites;

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Comments

One Response to “Using Tumblr as a Personal Aggregator”

  1. Jim Hughes on April 30th, 2007 12:43

    Looks like Tumblr is the new TagTagger – http://www.tagtagger.com/

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