I guess I'm sorta late to the party...
Today, Tumblr surpassed 10 billion total posts - 4.5 billion of which have come in just the past 3 months. That’s an absurd growth rate. Fittingly, I finally joined Tumblr just a few months before this boom.
I’ve always been attracted to Tumblr’s format, largely because my best thoughts come in bursts. And that’s not to say I don’t love writing and can’t spew prose ad infinitum - just look at my old Blogspot blog chronicling my on-again, off-again boxing career. My posts look more like chapters than concepts or updates.
If anything, I write too much. To a fault, actually, since it reaches the point where (counter-intuitively) I want to write so much that I convince myself I don’t have the time, drive or audience to actually make it worth the effort.
Before Tumblr, I’d have a good idea or a post-worthy update, but rarely could write about it immediately. So I’d stash the thought away, nurture it, build it, love it, and let it grow and develop… so that by the time I sat at my laptop I’d have 2000 words in my head, and ultimately decide that there was no benefit to taking a chunk of time to put finger-to-key and expel my thoughts. That, and since I wrote about my amateur boxing career and fandom rather than work-specific (read: cannibalistic) topics like social media and digital marketing, I figured no one outside my “boxing family” would think it was ever worth mentioning. Even now, I have no idea how to best bundle my rabid interests - boxing, baseball and the endless surprises of the Internet.
In the end, I guess the rapid adoption (or should I say “acceptance?”) of microblogging finally convinced me to quick caring what people thought of my medium and hop on-board. Sure, publishing on my own terms would’ve done wonders for my personal brand and let me capture so many more, priceless thought-nuggets that were squandered due to my fear of content creation in smaller, digestible spurts. But you live and you learn, and to this moment I’m still figuring out how to best collect my sweeping thoughts and interests without turning this into a digital scrapbook.
And it’s good to see so many others doing the same.
