That’s a book waiting to be written/drawn.

Personally, I use mine mostly as a place to publish/remember the random stuff I like across the internet, mainly so I can easily point it out to other people I know IRL. Sort of like social bookmarking, as mentioned above. I don’t bother with the tagging, though, since search is almost always sufficient.

But I don’t really participate in the “Tumblr community”. Sort of bad at that sort of thing&emdash;tend towards being an observer/thinker more than a collaborator. Which I’m working on, since this is the Web 2.0 era. But one thing that’s made me shy (ha!) away from Tumblr’s community-type features (which in general seem to be rather great) is that, due to the lack of comments, cross-Tumblr interaction is pretty shallow. Sure, it’s dead easy for me to reblog, and when I do so it shows up on the other Tumblr and starts a “conversation”. But I find in general that cross-blog conversations just don’t get read. It’s beyond most peoples’ “hassle threshold” to click all the reblogs or trackbacks, read them, and respond, so cross-blog “conversations” end up having lots of repetition and not much depth.

What frustrates me is that Tumblr could really easily add support for comments, with an optional “and reblog” checkbox on the side. Or at the very least, allow reblogs’ unique text to be integrated somehow. But real comments would be better, since there are a lot of times when I want to comment but not to post something on my blog. Disqus is alright, but a tighter integration with Tumblr (akin to what they’ve done with follows, likes, reblogs, etc.) would open up a world of possibilities.

My Tumblr’s at http://blog.jebdm.net/ . I noticed you didn’t post a link; perhaps you haven’t registered yet? If that’s the case, be sure to post whenever you do set it up.

That said, I’ve tried to be protective of my following count. It’s only in the teens and it is already on the edge of getting overwhelming.

Anyway, arriving late (yet again), there isn’t much to add to the great suggestions, insight, and advice above, but here’s a stab.

I started using Tumblr as a scrapbook, but since I don’t have another blog, it’s also where I share occasional rants and raves, many which start as comments elsewhere. I now have two more Tumblrs for teaching and if you are at all interested in why the TCS crowd uses Tumblr, scroll down about halfway through this post for some reasons. (See the lowercase-letter sequence.)

A few of my Tumblr favorites: Tim’s mini. Quiet Babylon, a grammar, Anne Galloway’s plsj, Russell Davies’s Dawdlr, and Buzz Andersen’s Sci-Fi Hi-Fi. And, of course all of my middle school students’ Tumblrs too. You can find them in the sidebar of the two that I use for class.

Finally, Scott Rafer says “Follow = RSS + Humanity” and Noah Brier expands.