How to Use Tumblr, Posterous & Other Light Blogging Services
Last week we took a poll asking for your favorite 'light' blogging service. These are blogging services that make it very easy for you to share content and media. While old-school blogging service Blogger.com got the most votes in our poll, newer slicker services such as Tumblr, Soup.io and the recently trendy Posterous are popular with early adopters.
Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.
1. Post Lots of Media
Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.
Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:
2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)
One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).
At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.
3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps
With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.
To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.
4. Customize Your Theme
All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:
5. Don't Take it Seriously
It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...
From Sween's Tumblr blog
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I just started blogging myself as a home base for other social media sites. Experienced bloggers probably underestimate how much of a barrier setting up a service like wordpad.com is for someone that just has something to say but few technical skills. I feel Like I can never get where I want to go at this point on those services. Posterous is filling a very important niche for me and I'm truly considering it as my main blog. Once I get some posts under my belt I can always consider moving the domain again.
If you're looking for good music blogs to follow and share on Tumblr, may I suggest you see my ongoing list of the best of them here: http://bit.ly/G3Z5b
thanks for the link:)
clementine
We blog by assembling pixels.
Ergo, all blogging is "light" blogging! ;)
(Sorry.)
You should also think of getting your own domain. In addition to themes, all mentioned services offer the possibility to use custom domains. Not satisfied with Tumblr or Blogger anymore? Just keep your web address and import all posts into Posterous for example.
There's an easy way to configure custom domains for all these services with iWantMyName, you should check it out: http://iwantmy.name/a :)
I never really thought of Blogger as a light platform. But I can see how some bloggers use it that way.
Tumblr has been some fun, and I can see how they've got a leg-up on others because there are many bloggers posting and commenting, re-blogging, etc.
For me, though, Posterous is the cat's pajamas. And I like the default theme! http://ericmatas.posterous.com/
I like Posterous, because I can post to many different services: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, even Blogger and WordPress. I also like the default theme -- it's crisp and clean.
Tumblr has been the best for me of late. I've spent some time over the past few days customizing it to fit my needs. I'll take a look at Posterous given the positive feedback here.