Tumblr's Brilliance

I think one of the brilliant things about Tumblr is that it has found a way around the blog gentrification problem. Whenever I have a blog or a website that I regularly post to I like to feel that my posts are getting more intelligent. I feel like I have a duty not to waste my reader’s time. And as the quality improves, the readers increase. The end result is that my standards become higher than my motivation and I stop posting. For example, I’m pretty sure that I mentioned this problem here before—and I find it acutely embarassing. But I shall perservere.

Tumblr has circumvented this problem. In order to make a tumblelog look attractive, it’s useful to mix up the media a bit. (Speaking of which, I should probably look into a new theme. My present one fails the “attractive” test.) This makes it necessary to, fairly frequently, post images or videos.

In other words, if I don’t feel like writing substantive, I can (and in fact must) link to a picture of a kitty. Then the next post only has to be more thought provoking than the picture of the kitty. Mandatory kitty posting keeps my standards low enough that my tumble log can continue indefinitely.