Winter Cleaning
It’s winter again.
The work I do tends to be seasonal; carpentry jobs slow in the winter months, especially in the few months before and after Christmas. I figure people are just spending that money on new flat screens and stuff, rather than on woodwork. Things usually pick up again in the Spring when people start to get their Tax Refunds back.
That said, it’s winter, and I’m rather underemployed at the moment. That means I get to spend more time fiddling about the house, working on woodwork projects for my self, and playing on my computer. And yes, one of my favorite wastes of time on the computer is Tumblr.
After trying to become “re-engaged” with Tumblr in the last week or so, I’ve discovered that many of the blogs I once followed are no longer actively posting, others have disappeared, and others are posting things I’m no longer interested in. Well: people grow, times change, etc.
In that light of change, I’ve decided to “reboot” my Tumblr. I un-subscribed from around 150 blogs, leaving me with about 25 that I still like. However, this has left my dashboard rather empty and static. It also made me realize how my Tumblr usage has been stuck in a rut of roughly the same kind of content, over and over, for some time. Much of the same: different posters.
I’m looking for something new and different, something to keep me engaged, not just clicking “Next” or “Reload” with my eyes glazed for hours. With the absence of adequate “meta” information (tags, etc) posted by most bloggers, and the lackluster “search” functionality within Tumblr itself, this has proven difficult.
Couple with this the fact that most individual blog’s “themes” for viewing their content make it rather, well, difficult to view their content in any kind of comprehensive way. The lack of standardization when viewing an individual blog is frustrating:
- Simple navigation: like finding the “Go to the next page of content” link/button, is often quite impossible to find
- Lack of the same “meta” data on posts: some show tags, some don’t; some show the ‘reblogged from’; some don’t; some show a link to the “Notes” about the post, other’s dont
- Tumblr’s own lack of an ability to browse a blog in a standardized way, i.e., with something like the Dashboard, except for individual blogs.
In a way, I find it surprising that Tumblr is as engaging as it apparently is for some people, with no good way to locate new content that interests you. I suppose that most people just get trapped in some kind of Möbius strip of endless content. It goes on and on forever, in a “follow the yellow brick road” kind of content stream.
Unless you realize you’re trapped in an infinite loop; and then you’re just discouraged and befuddled. How can I dig my way out of this?
So far, I’ve tried a simple reboot. That’s what I do when my computer is misbehaving. Now I’m trying a kind of shotgun approach. I more or less “followed” 50 or so new blogs, based solely on one post I saw and liked. This has filled my Dashboard with lots of content. But still the task of sorting through it, identifying those blogs which regularly post interesting things, those which don’t; identifying likely “blogs of interest” based on who reblogs from whom — all of this is very time consuming, and personally, not particularly enjoyable.
Perhaps I’m missing some of the intentional interest of Tumblr itself: that crawling around, jumping from post to blog to blog to post to blog…. to find things you like. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the “thrill of the hunt” — it’s just that the process, as is, is too tedious.
Nor do I want logging into my Tumblr dashboard to be like turning on the television: you’ve got 100 channels to choose from, but the programming on each channel is fixed. So either you keep hitting “next channel” or just resign yourself to that same glazed-eye dissociative stare for hours because you just can’t be bother flipping channels anymore.
So, anyone who follows, I’d like your advice on this. How do you go about finding new and interesting content on Tumblr? Do you ever feel like you’ve been trapped in this Möbius strip of content?
And do you have any blogs to recommend?
Thanks, Eric
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