Zenning!

I recently started a blog on Tumblr called Sawant’s Scrapbook and I have to confess, it’s a very slick blogging experience! Tumblr excites me!

Currently, Zenning (this blog of mine) is being served by Wordpress, as it has been since its inception. So, even for a pro user of Wordpress like me, Tumblr shows me that blogging can not only be easier (yes, easier than Wordpress even) but it can be a lot more fun too!

From their about page:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML.

It’s so much more easy (and did I mention fun?) to post on Tumblr that I am blogging there much more frequently than I do here at Zenning.

For now, I am utilizing my tumble blog as a scrapbook, where I post about anything and everything that I happen to land upon (mostly short posts)! It’s like my place of zen! My idea pad! My lab!! Whereas I will be posting the longer posts – the ones that are more analytical – over here at Zenning. I am pondering over the idea of merging the two, or at least, aggregating the two together.

The only drawback of Tumblr that I have so far come across is that comments on your blog can only be posted by Tumblr users! Now, that’s a major drawback for a service that is positioning itself as a competing blogging/micro-blogging platform against the likes of Wordpress and Blogger.

But despite the drawback, I am in ♥ with Tumblr.

Do check out Sawant’s Scrapbook and follow me on Tumblr.

I was just reading this article Why there will be many Twitters (Scripting News) by Dave Winer, where the author makes his case for why he thinks there are going to be many Twitter (clones) out there, and that ultimately one of them is going to be THE Twitter – one platform to rule them all.

But isn’t Twitter already a de facto for micro-blogging? Yes, surely, clones are going to pop up left, right and center, but how can one make something better than Twitter? Twitter’s success lies in its utmost simplicity. More features is just going to make it more complex. Imagine if someone comes up with a Twitter clone, that can have text in bold, italics, or underlined. (That doesn’t sound that bad, hmm.)

How about a clone that is funded by some major media network – Time Warner, Fox, NBC – and they get celebrities to ‘tweet’ on their Twitter? That surely is going to draw away the hordes of followers who only live to idolize these celebrities and follow them on wherever they are. For example, if Ashton Kutcher – the first twillionaire – shifts to a Twitter-clone, he is surely going to walk away with his million followers on Twitter. Oprah will take her followers if she decides to build her own social platform. Yes, Twitter might lose so many followers. But that’s all a big IF!

Celebrity endorsements are definitely good for any social website out there, but a social website needs much more than celebrities. In the case of micro-blogging, it needs simplicity; it needs ease of use; it needs ubiquity; it needs active user base; it needs to evoke an industry around it. Twitter has been able to do all that without much effort, especially the last part, and it continues to grow at astounding rates.

Twitter is not a success because of celebrities tweeting on it. It’s because Twitter is a success that celebrities are tweeting on it.