Without being too much of a historical bore, the Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and professor of education. It was meant to eventually replace the QWERTY layout on keyboards–the one you’re most likely using at this moment–but even by 1936, with empirical research showing that the alternate layout reduced finger movement, increased speed, and simply made more sense on the whole, the QWERTY layout was already too entrenched with typists and typewriter companies for them to change.

QWERTY is a keyboard layout created in 1874 by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the first functional typewriter. His first attempts to create a keyboard, unsurprisingly, had the keys arranged in the order of the alphabet, but he soon recognized that the proximity of common English digraphs (s-t, for example) to each other on the layout made it so that the keys would jam when pressed rapidly in succession. So, with the time-proven method of trial and error, he split any problematic key combinations up–read: because of the limitations of the typewriter technology, not because of actual typing efficiency–and effectively created the random arrangement of keys that is QWERTY. This isn’t to say that QWERTY is all bore and no fun, however. Most people aren’t aware of this particular Easter egg, but if you take a look at the top row of your keyboard, you’ll notice all the letters to the word “typewriter” present, an exciting legacy of Sholes’s associate, James Denmore.

By the time Sholes had fixed the key-jamming issue and could devise a more ergonomically sound arrangement of keys, Remington, the gun manufacturer turned typewriter company to which he sold his design, was already minting typewriters en masse and had no use for improvements in the layout. Thus, a century later, the world still types based upon the technological inadequacies of the 19th century.

And now, the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout. Based on usage studies, August Dvorak made a keyboard based a number of ergonomic principles. Foremost, he noticed that QWERTY users tend to type with one hand and spend a lot of time typing on the bottom row of the keyboard, the most inaccessible to reach. To remedy this, he devised a scheme in which the user is forced to alternate typing hands with vowels on the left home row (AOEU instead of ASDF) and common consonants on the right home row (HTNS instead of JKL;). Commonly used keys exist on the home row and upper row, with the hard-to-reach bottom row being relegated to uncommon glyphs, like the semicolon, k, and j. The layout encourages inboard stroke flow versus out-; note that when tapping on a table, it’s easier to go from pinky to index in succession than the reverse.

There are plenty of more wonderful things that Dvorak does to eliminate the inefficiencies of QWERTY, but I could fill volumes bloviating. There are studies which contest that Dvorak increases typing speed, and there’s certainly a bit of ongoing debate in that realm. I think, though, that that’s irrelevant; no studies contest that when typing regular English passages, Dvorak significantly reduces finger movement in comparison to QWERTY, and long-term use of Dvorak, hence, is not only more intuitive but vastly more comfortable. It just makes sense that when the keys are right under your fingers most of the time, you’re going to be more efficient.

I think it’s wondrous that it took me two months learning Dvorak to achieve my prior WPM speed that lifelong typing with QWERTY had yielded. Albeit, that’s not to say that the switch was the most pleasant experience I’ve had.

The story of how I came upon Dvorak is quite mundane and unexciting, really. It was during the later days of past summer, mid-August, that I saw a Reddit article pop up on the front page–though I’d certainly seen it there before–discussing the author’s fascination with the arrangement. I read the comment thread on the post, did some Wikipedia research, read some blog entries, read more articles in publications, and decided that I wanted to switch. Luckily I’d given myself two weeks before classes started to work up towards a decent speed on the layout. I initially just changed my system settings to use Dvorak and referenced a printed-out keyboard image propped next to my display, but a week later, I popped out and rearranged the keys on my keyboard. The first couple of weeks were painfully slow while the QWERTY layout burned into my muscle memory slowly learned to budge aside and allow me to pick up on Dvorak. I avoided IMing like the plague, not wanting to come off as a boor who’d take an hour to type a sentence. But as classes swung around, typing full-length papers and constant immersion in the layout eventually produced results, and what was an acceptable typing speed gave way to an excellent one. Where I sit now, I type 25% faster than I ever did with QWERTY, and I’m still improving. The increase in comfortability in conjunction with speed makes it so that I can type for hours with no fatigue at all, something of a problem I’d had hitherto. I recently bought a MacBook Pro, and the first thing I did upon its arrival was to remove the keys and rearrange it to the Dvorak layout.

It would be a bit dishonest, however, to solely discuss the positives of using Dvorak without mentioning the downsides. None of my quibbles with Dvorak concern the layout itself but rather in being a Dvorak user in a world honed for QWERTY. The most apparent problem is using public terminals. I’m still decent with QWERTY, the oft-used analogy being learning different guitar tunings; you can learn a new one without forgetting the prior, and there are many who regularly switch between a primary and an alternate. This given, there’s a bit of latency for me to get “into it,” a period of maybe a couple of minutes where my brain is still in Dvorak mode and I fumble for keys before approaching full fluency once more. It’s not as much of a problem as it could be, though, because on my USB flash drive that I carry whenever I need work done at public computers, I have a tray app called “dvassist.exe” that switches the layout on Windows for me. It’s convenient in that it works even on computers where access to system preferences is blocked, and I don’t need the keyboard hardware itself to be switched, since I’m a touch typist anyhow. Perhaps if the world predominantly switched to OSX I’d be in a quandary, but most OSX computers don’t block access to keyboard preferences. To be fair, none of this software voodoo is applicable, say, when typing for a moment’s worth on a friend’s computer for something. Another issue is the fact that most mobile devices–even the iPhone, that doesn’t have a physical keyboard–only support QWERTY. So a bit of advice for would-be Dvorak users is to stay dually versed, being a minority in an overwhelmingly backward society.

Given the negatives, of which there are few and negligible, in comparison with the postives, I’d urge any and all to give the Dvorak layout a shot. It’s been great for me, and scientific evidence shows that it’s actually better and easier to learn the QWERTY. If that’s not enough, the world’s fastest typist, Barbara Blackburn, typed at 212 WPM on a Dvorak keyboard. Although a couple of the people I know have been interested by the layout, some even having tried it for a period of time, nobody I know has stuck with it, mainly because they don’t feel that the time spent learning it is worth the hassle. The choice for me was plainly apparent, and the exchange I made for a couple of weeks of slogging was well worth it, for the rest of my life with computers.

So there’s my pitch. You should try it. Only, take the plunge when you have some time off.

His afternoon visit to the tea stall was more reliable than any clock that the villagers knew. Precisely at four o’clock the old man would appear out of the dusty bend in the road, carrying naught but a yellow pouch slung across his shoulder, a tattered notebook in his hand. A minute or so later, he would settle into one of the red lawn chairs arranged in front of the stall and deposit his items beneath his seat. The store owner, a good-natured, potbellied man named Muthu, would boom his welcome and ask him what he’d like. It was always the same order: a small glass of chai with a pack of Marie Gold biscuits. Rajan would eat a half of the biscuits and give the other half to the youngest vagrant in the vicinity. He would mysteriously jot some things down in his notebook, pick up his items, wish Muthu a good day, and leave from the way he had come. Never would he arrive late; never would he leave past due.

And so it was one day, without circumstance or notification, that he stopped coming. It was a Thursday; nothing remarkable or atypical took place that day in the village–not that many days saw such things anyway. Muthu served his regulars and wiped his dirty tumblers all throughout the day, scanning the horizon for a hint of the hobbling old man who marked four o’clock. The hour came and went, but all that emerged from the bend in the road was dust and stray cattle. Muthu was disconcerted, and so were the local vagrant boys. Something in their daily rhythm was amiss without Rajan, without the quiet, strange man writing his notes and occasionally inquiring about the recent cricket scores.

One of the boys, shirtless and ruffled, approached the stall and asked of the podgy shopkeeper, “Master, where is the old man? He always gives us biscuits. I like him.”

Muthu turned around behind his counter and considered the scruffy boy. He realized he’d never talked to these boys before, that he would always play bystander to Rajan’s kindly banter with them. He continued wiping the eversilver tumbler he held as he spoke. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything. It’s already quite late today, and I don’t think he’ll still be coming. Why don’t I give you a pack of Marie Gold for you to split with your friends? Free of charge.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

Muthu handed the boy the colorful plastic package. He eagerly ran off to divide it with the rest of his group idly sitting on the curb adjacent to the tea stall. Even as the boys ate the carefully rationed biscuits, they stared out towards the bend in the road, looking for any sign of the familiar old man swiftly carrying his bags out of the dust. Muthu caught himself staring down the same path, wiping a glass so long that he could see every wrinkle in his face in it when he looked back down again. He too was getting old. Time wasn’t kind.

First, I have to say that I’m a fan of Lupe Fiasco. I like what he’s doing for the industry, I love his lyricism, and he’s a great musician. He’s a breath of fresh air in the face of all the crap that’s on the mainstream rap scene today. I enjoyed a couple of his songs on Food and Liquor, as well as his guest appearances on other artists’ songs. This release however, puts all his previous work, and the rest of the industry, to shame.

The Cool, although it does many things superbly, does the worst at upholding its namesake. It’s supposed to be a criticism of thug-culture in the mainstream rap of today, but only a couple of songs, “Dumb it Down” being the most notable, fit this theme. Once you get into the album though, you quickly forget about this and lose yourself in everything that makes The Cool exceptional.Lupe Fiasco’s poetry is what sets this album apart from the rest. Not only does his excellence in lyricism shine in many of the songs, it’s the creativitity of the content that makes it fresh and engrossing no matter how many times it’s replayed. There’s no way that anyone else in the rap game today would write a song from the perspective of a hamburger, as he does in “Gotta Eat.” In “Put You on Game,” Lupe becomes a metaphorical embodiment of all of society’s problems: “Some of your smartest have tried to articulate my whole part in this, but they’re fruitless in their harvest/The drone grows from my footsteps; I’m the one that they follow, I am the one that they march with/Through the back alleys and the black markets/The oval offices, crackhouses and apartments/Through the mazes of the queens, the pages of the sages and the chambers of the kings.”

This kind of deep poetry and vivid imagery is abundant throughout the album. In “Little Weapon,” Lupe describes the life of child soldiers, and in “Streets On Fire,” he creates an alternate world driven to destruction by a pandemic.

However, this isn’t to say that all of The Cool is dark and moody, as suggested by the album artwork; there are quite a few light and laid-back pieces, as epitomized by the super-jazzy “Paris, Tokyo,” (in which he drops an iPhone reference) or his speedy “Go Go Gadget Flow,” (with a sly Sega Genesis name-drop). The juxtaposition of light pieces with dark pieces offers nice variety, but it’s somewhat unnatural at times, given the stark contrast of the subject matter. It’s interesting to note that instead of closing off the album with a dark, pensive number like “Fighters” or the rock-driven “Hello/Goodbye,” Lupe drops a light pop beat with “Go Baby,” which is by all means a decent track, but it feels out of place and diminished by the production quality and lyrical content of the rest of The Cool, in both areas being rather weak.

If you haven’t gathered, the vast majority of the songs on The Cool are hands-down amazing, with heavy beats, heavy lyricism, and heavy meaning. Given this, there are still some mediocre to subpar tracks on the album that take away from what would have merited it a 10/10. Some of these I just never listen to, being too occupied by the exceptional songs on the album. Some of the low points are at “Gold Watch” with its annoying-as-hell repeating voice sample (what is she even saying?) that it could have done without, or other tracks like “The Die” or “The Coolest” which are just boring.

On the whole, however, The Cool is hands-down the best rap release of the year, and possibly one of my most listened-to whole albums of the year, second only to In Rainbows. The poetry, the fresh creativity, and the all-at-once dark or light beats all make The Cool a superb album. I highly recommend even shelling out the money to buy it legitimately (something I rarely do) just to support the production of these kinds of gems.

High points:

• “Little Weapon”
• “Put You On Game”
• “Fighters”
• “Streets on Fire”
• “Paris, Tokyo”
• “Gotta Eat”
• “Hello/Goodbye”
• “Superstar”

Low points:

• “Gold Watch”
• “The Coolest”
• “The Die”

Score: 

The following are the comments that were on the original post:

1. Ethan Sherbondy  |  December 23rd, 2007 at 8:35 pm

So many high points, so many nerdy drop-ins, so much allegory.
I’m having difficulty listening to anything else as well.

Here’s the story. July 4th in Raleigh was rainy, and the forecasts predicted around a week more of thunderstorms and gloomy weather. Saturday swings around, and it’s basically a monsoon, fearsome lightning rattling the vicinity every five minutes. I don’t mind this and I go about business as usual, brawsin’ the webs and watching television. Around 5:00pm, while I’m sifting through unread Google Reader entries, I hear a crack of lightning that’s so close that the room flashes bright and I jump. All the electronics in the house shut off and turn back on. I check to see if my TV and computer are still fine, and they are. It turns out, though, that my internet/satellite connection is fried, and I’ll have to wait for field technicians to turn out and replace the components. I wallow in boredom for innumerable hours, getting further on some design projects and playing MGS4.

It’s late, and I go to sleep. At around 3am, I get a call from a neighbor asking if I’m all right. After some groggy discussion, I gather that there’s a giant, raging fire two houses down in my lane. I walk out into the street, and the flames are still burning; all I can smell is burning plastic. It’s hot as balls. I talk to the huddled group of neighbors in the street. They’ve gathered that the owners are on vacation, but their two cats got burned alive. So I walk back to bed and don’t wake up until the cable technician arrives in the afternoon.

It turns out that my router is fried, too. I go buy a new one and spend the rest of the day monkeying around with the house’s internet connections until, finally, it works. I still don’t have a satellite connection until Friday.

Seriously.

The fact of the matter is that Cloverfield is fresh. Fresh in the sense that it’s not one of the soulless million-times rehashed story mechanisms in the monster-movie genre, one of the plenty movies that are in the vein of crap like Godzilla. The splendor of this movie is its focus on humanism rather than stunning 360o shots of destroyed buildings and lengthy backstory on an uncreative CGI monster.

The entire movie is shot in a home-video/YouTube submission kind of style, all from the perspective of one of the characters in the movie. Really, that’s the main reason this movie is so different, and this is the root of the rabid division in the reception of the movie. So the story is this (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to read teh spoilarz): the main character, Rob, played by Michael Stahl-David, is having a surprise party thrown for him, since a promotion has landed him a job in Japan. At some point, the camera gets handed to Hud, the character who “shoots” most of the film. Hud provides some of the only character diversity in this movie; while everyone else is serious, frightened, and caught up in the events of the attack, he’s the feckless, bumbling, good-natured guy who tries to cheer everyone up and provides some well-needed comic relief. Anyway, a ways into the party, there’s a power surge and something like an earthquake occurs. They flee, and Rob stays back with a couple of brave idiots to be a hero. There’s the premise for the story. If you want a complete plot synopsis, I’m damn lazy.

Back to why Cloverfield blew my pants off. This isn’t to say that any movie that’s shot in home-video style is great. No, it’s the focus that set it apart. Somebody in the very early production of this film thought that to focus on one person’s story rather than a monster’s story was the angle that the story needed. Indeed it did - the focus of Cloverfield on the horrific events of the story as seen through a person’s eyes, rather than a well-funded film studio’s eyes, provided realism (or about as much realism as can be attributed to a movie about a giant lizard-creature attacking New York). It’s more a story of emotions and personal turmoil than one of crumbling buildings and a beheaded Statue of Liberty, more real than detached stories of monster-violence tend to be.

But, for all the creativity and realness of the story, there were still some oddities that I picked up throughout the movie. Oh yeah, spoilers follow.

• What’s with the little parasite monsters? You know, the ones that pwned military officers while they were shooting RPG missiles in the streets, but got beat down by Marlena in the dark subway. And not just one, but five of them.
• The crowbars. Why were they so conveniently placed, wherever there was a parasite attack?
• Hud has a pretty nice camera. Like, one that can capture in 1080p and 7.1 channel surround sound.
• And one that can survive bridge cave-ins that even people can’t.
• But he sucks at holding a camera. I mean, god, even inside a building, at the party, he couldn’t take a single static shot without twitching the camera. A little less amateurism might have sacrificed authenticity for the disorientation I had when I walked out of the theater.

But that’s just me being nitpicky. I’ll forgive these unrealisms for the fact that this movie was a fresh breath of air. And for the fact that there wasn’t some long-ass explanation of the monster’s history and genealogy anywhere in the movie; it only let us know what the characters knew, and that was just enough.

Score: 

The following are the comments that were on the original post:

1. Ethan Sherbondy  |  January 20th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

So, why a ten point scale?
If you’re going to quantify your rating to the tenths place, doesn’t it make more sense to be out of 100?… or do a percentage?

Or why not do it à la conventional movie reviewing mode?
Who doesn’t love stars?

2. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  January 20th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

Hm, I’ve actually thought about this some, and I settled on the x.x scale for a couple of reasons.

For one, I dislike using stars. I think they’re imprecise, and they can’t be applied to all types of media. Well, I guess they could, but I’d really rather not.

Second, the x.x scale is considered more conventional than both /100 and percentage scores, although there are a few reviewers who use these. I’d rather stick to x.x because it’s as precise as I’d like to be, and it doesn’t seem like a grade or something that it ought to be fulfill, as with /100 scores or percentages.

1. “Dude, why?”
2. Upon hearing precisely why, “Oh. So, anything new happening?”
3. Upon hearing what exactly is brewing, “Eh, the old zetahydrae was better. Bad move.”

It’s happened often enough now that I felt I’d finally use this new medium to talk about it. Just the fact that I can do this, sit down and write, is something that’s nigh impossible with the tumblelog platform. For the unacquainted, Tumblr is something of a del.icio.us dump with a design, as put by Revista in his abandonment of tumblelogging. It’s not only that that bothers me now; I love del.icio.us. The problem is that Tumblr advertises their platform as “the easiest way to share yourself.” That’s a lie.

It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you. Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.” And through that, you’re “sharing yourself.”

If I, or in the case of the older zetahydrae, the reader, wanted to find links that I found interesting on the web, I wouldn’t visit a tumblelog - why would I? There’s absolutely nothing that a tumblelog adds to the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon. At least those are personal; you have control over what’s being shoved in your face - you only pursue topics of interest to you. Why, then, is a middleman necessary? To dress up the experience with their vast expanse of XHTML and CSS knowledge? Or to “share themselves” through the three or four lines that accompany each of their tired, regurgitated links?

The only reason for me to visit a blog is to read matters as seen through the eyes of the author, to culture myself by exposing myself to differing points of view; that’s character-strengthening, being able to do that. There’s nothing of this sort being added in a tumblelog; the content is cold, distant, and unemotional - the author has barely a role in his own site. For all I care, it could be maintained by an RSS feed of some dude’s favorite del.icio.us tags. And that’s precisely why I have no problem with del.icio.us or even Pownce, even though the latter doesn’t really have a real use for me yet. Unlike Tumblr, which puts an emphasis on the author, you, and the tumbling community, del.icio.us is plain and dry: bookmark what you like, and look at what a lot of people bookmarked - maybe you’ll like that too. Pownce, on the other hand, emphasizes the opposite end of the spectrum, sharing links with your friends. There’s no real emphasis on authorship; you’re just showing your buddies things you thought were cool. The only reason I’m not active on Pownce is because I don’t have enough friends who are into the whole intertubes thing.

On the subject of emotion and author’s point-of-view, both which make even the most inaccurate and vacuous sites fun to read (see: Valleywag) and which tumblelogs are lacking, I think that most t’loggers have recognized the problem. Many of the most popular tumblelogs — Marco.org and cameron i/o are examples — all have “articles” sections, where longer posts are written. And, oddly enough, these longer posts are much more fun to read than the short little stubs of emotionless links. Even in the traditional tumblelog, the longer posts are the better ones, affording the author’s insight into the topic and a unique outlook on certain issues, but in the world of Tumblr, long posts are bad etiquette. The way the Tumblr dashboard is set up, something like Twitter’s homepage, with multiple subscribed feeds indexed, long posts are large, ugly, unwieldy, and whore your screen real-estate. So, tumbleloggers stray away from them, thereby eliminating anything and everything that makes visiting a site worthwhile.

And that’s why I quit. Because, simply put, I just don’t have the patience to sift through twice-regurgitated news and I don’t feel like maintaining something that’s supremely useless in terms of lasting value. This, this blog, this new platform, allows me to actually expose myself, and that’s why I switched. Want links? Look at the middle column, go read my del.icio.us links. Better yet, go visit Digg. Want spur-of-the-moment, undeveloped thoughts? Look at my Twitter page.

But if you want real content, this is where you should be.

Upon publishing this post, a large discussion as to the validity of the arguments presented in this essay was ignited. The following are the comments that were on the original post:

1. ScottBruin  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:11 pm

Pad the left side of your content column and title. Everything’s way too hard to read

2. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

Not a bad idea, Scott, but I’d rather not at the moment. Maybe if I find it so in time, or if I get a lot of negative feedback on the issue.

3. Andrew Cornett  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

Let me start with telling you how I found your article.

I was in my Tumblr dashboard and I noticed the latest post from cubicle17 about cameron’s redesign. So, being a designer I decided to check out this nice redesign. Really nice. What was his most current link? Voila.

This is a great article. I agree that Tumblr makes it way too easy to regurgitate things you found, and the recent “post my digg rss feed” doesn’t help.

A long time ago I wanted to setup my own homepage with a blog like everyone else, but instead I just wanted to keep it updated with screenshots of interfaces I work on. I wanted the system to be really easy… I just upload a photo, theres a title, a link, description. The easiest thing I could find out of the box was a simple wordpress blog.

The problem for me was wordpress seemed really clunky and over engineered for what I was trying to do. When I found Tumblr I knew right away that this has to be the easiest “blogging” solution I’ve seen. So simple, and exactly what I want.

I like being able to take a screenshot with a firefox plugin, and just email that off to my Tumblr address and have it update without much needed from me at all. Where Tumblr really shines is how simple and easy it is to get content online. But if all you’re doing is “reblogging” like Tumblr heavily suggests, then I agree with you and I wouldn’t be spending any time on someone’s Tumblr looking for cool links.

I didn’t get into Pownce enough either. I’m in the same boat. Not enough inter-friends. I would use Pownce a lot more if they did offer me some of the features Tumblr did. I like being able to email photos right off of my iphone, I like being able to use my own domain, and I think some kind of mix between a Tumblr and Pownce would be awesome. Anyway.

Here’s to meeting more inter-friends.

I really enjoyed your article.

4. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:34 pm

Hey, thanks for the feedback, Andrew. I agree; the usage of Tumblr as a portfolio of sorts seems quite appropriate.

By the way, I took a look at your website - just a suggestion: from where I’m standing, the text is camouflaged into your background.

5. Andrew Cornett  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

Oh man, bad timing.

I was trying out cubicle17’s theme and for some reason it used the color scheme from the default tumblr theme. It’s better now. But I’d really like to sit down and make my own tumblr theme at some point.

And I noticed my Tumblr homepage is messy, I’m taking off the digg feed.

6. alicia  |  December 12th, 2007 at 1:34 am

i have a hard time disagreeing with many of your points. i can’t handle seeing things reblogged endlessly or having to sift through pages and pages of info i’m not remotely interested in just to find something unique. that said, i do reblog some. but much more of what is on my tumblelog is stuff that actually has to do with my life, so much so that i’m guessing it is boring for the people following me (because they don’t actually know me in real life). anyhow, i’ve stopped following tumblr users who just feed in their outside links and status updates in and produce no original content and those who post like 20 times a day.

7. dalas v  |  December 12th, 2007 at 1:35 am

This article seems to make a lot of assumptions. The biggest assumption is that you show up on Tumblr and start following a lot of bad tumblelogs. I follow lots of great tumblelogs that combine original content and content that I would not see on major sites like digg.

Also, think about the concept of “sharing yourself” in real life. If you met someone, would you immediately deliver the huge monologue that is this blog entry? Or would you talk about shared interests, things you’ve both seen, things the other person should check out?

Maybe if your current friends had tumblelogs you would understand the power of the platform more. I started tumbling at the same time as a few of my friends and I have met lots of good people through Tumblr. If someone only reblogs or links to things, it does not give you a full picture of their personality, but many of the best tumblrs throw in enough original content that I do feel as though they are “sharing themselves” with me.

8. Christopher Clay  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:06 am

I put up some quick thoughts at http://kitchen.soup.io/post/532430

Tumblelogging is just easy, low-overhead publication. What users make of that is their choice: The spectrum ranges from general-purpose tumblelogs with little original content and limited appeal to the world at large (but likely still lots of value within a person’s social circle!) all the way to much more focused or original streams. But who’s to say which usage is good or bad?

That’s not to say that platforms couldn’t do things a lot better: I think one problem might be that right now, the same software is used for both tumblelog creation and reading, and these built-in readers are still very barebones, offering no way to filter content, sort subscriptions into groups of various importance, etc. Subscribing over RSS doesn’t really work either: Just that bold number of unread items an RSS reader will display doesn’t fit with the no-strings-attached mental model at all (see Revista saying he/she kept marking all as read).

But of course if you enjoy writing longer, more infrequent, mostly text posts, then by all means blogging is right for you. It’s not for me – so I’ll keep a tumblelog with a certain amount of quality control.

9. Wolf  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:53 am

I must be the exception since my Tumblrlog consists of content of my own for the biggest part (http://wolfs.tumblr.com/).

10. David Karp  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:55 am

Hi Prashanth,

Congrats on the new blog! Long form definitely seems natural for you. I just wanted to defend a few points about Tumblr and tumblelogging that I think you were a little off on.

[Please excuse any typos — It’s late in NY, and I really wanted to get in on this discussion!]

> It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you.

I think this is overlooking something special about tumblelogs. Unlike long form blogs that offer an editorialized voice, we’ve always likened tumblelogs to looking through the author’s eyes. Sure, a person’s library history won’t show you much, but what I decide to put on my bookshelf might reveal a lot about me. Start flipping through those pages and seeing what I decided to highlight, and not only will you know me better, you might discover something you would have otherwise overlooked. Pair this with some photos I have framed in the same room and now you’ve got a window into my mind and experiences. It’s that rawness that makes us love this form. Everything meaningful in your life goes up, without having to explain or articulate yourself. As we usually say: Anything you find, love, hate, or create.

> Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.”

Not sure who you’ve been following that you’ve been having such a forgettable experience on your Dashboard, but making it easier to discover interesting content and individuals is something we’ve started to give a lot of attention to recently. On my Dashboard I’m following about 40 close friends, and 40 other like-minded or generally interesting folks. Sure there’s some noise, but the vast majority of posts I see are extremely meaningful to the authors, and connect me to them in a really magical way.

I’d also like to point out that 10% of all Tumblr posts come from mobile phones where people aren’t anywhere near a computer.

We see so many new tumbleloggers, every day, that are using tumblelogs to share themselves without the mold of the closed platforms (Digg, Facebook, Flickr) and without the overhead of that big empty textarea you see every time you post to Blogger.

> There’s absolutely nothing that a tumblelog adds to the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon.

Well let’s start with what it offers the publisher. I can have a record of my bookmarks on a public page which I have zero control over, or a page I designed on my dot-com that lets me share absolutely anything important to me.

Now, with that level of freedom of expression, people have begun sharing themselves in a way that was rarely available on the web. Remember how many of us aren’t wordy, or aren’t enchanted by the idea of editing our own newspaper column. Do we really think more than 5% of internet users are bloggers?

So now you have all these individuals sharing themselves and their experiences who would have never even been visible.

When you find one or several of these personalities who truly fascinate you (the first for me was project.ioni.st), the experience of following them can — sorry to repeat myself — be absolutely magical. In large part, I’m sure, because you’re following _them_ rather than their column or editorial voice.

> Even in the traditional tumblelog, the longer posts are the better ones…

Sometimes, sure. But that’s a very unbalanced comparison. Obviously, the long, well thought out, proofread, and formatted blog article is going to be much deeper and more engaging than a single photo of something I was doing today. But those little pieces come together with little effort, and tell the author’s story. Then consider the many, many, many, users who can’t or don’t care to blog, and you can see why tumblelogging has been so empowering for so many people.

> Long posts are bad etiquette. The way the Tumblr dashboard is set up, something like Twitter’s homepage, with multiple subscribed feeds indexed, long posts are large, ugly, unwieldy, and whore your screen real-estate. So, tumbleloggers stray away from them, thereby eliminating anything and everything that makes visiting a site worthwhile.

This has definitely been true when viewing long content on the Tumblr Dashboard. An upcoming interface update will make those posts play much more nicely in this view. Tumblr already takes every form of media, and we always want to support all styles/lengths of text. Meanwhile, long posts should already look great when viewed on your tumblelog. (or at least as great as every other long unwieldy blog post)

> Look at the middle column, go read my del.icio.us links. Better yet, go visit Digg. Want spur-of-the-moment, undeveloped thoughts? Look at my Twitter page.

You might do just as well to put your links and thoughts in a tumblelog to supplement your long articles. Your thoughts won’t be confined to 140 characters, and sharing interesting quotes or media will be just as easy as tossing links on Delicious. Embed that in your center column and you’re set! You can use Tumblr’s Bookmarklet, and it looks like some of your links would be better displayed as photos or quotes anyway.

> I don’t feel like maintaining something that’s supremely useless in terms of lasting value.

Right now on http://www.davidslog.com/archive you can see everything I was doing, every profound thing I heard or read, every funny conversation I had, every neat web page I discovered, and pretty much anything that was meaningful or interesting to me during the last year. That might be incredibly boring to _you_. It might have no lasting value in terms of SEO or monetization. But for my friends, for people who think I or the things I’m doing are interesting, this is a raw look into my life (and back at my life, for me).

No question, long-form blogs are great. Earlier this year we wrote about why we keep the official Tumblr Blog on Wordpress: http://blog.davidville.com/2007/02/23/why-wordpress. But for many people, tumblelogs are just as (and sometimes lots more) fun and a whole lot easier.

Thanks for giving it a shot, and good luck with the new blog!

11. logan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 3:17 am

hey prashanth - i really enjoyed your thoughts. there does seem to be a bit of a buzz going on about whether or not tumblr is worth a damn (in fact, that’s how i came upon the system a few weeks ago). i agree that it’s pretty awful for traditional blogging, both aesthetically and in practice. but like andrew, i think that it’s a very valuable tool for those of us who want an internet presence without necessarily wanting to write.

tumblr is a virtual inspiration board for me. i mostly use it to store pictures i’ve found in my internet travels, but also some quotes that i had cut and pasted and saved to a word doc and some links that i’d normally have bookmarked and forgot about it. i’ve sent the link to a few friends, but mostly i’m the one that visits the site. it’s a consortium of things i love and that are inspiring to me, all in one pretty place.

as far as following tumblrlogs, i haven’t signed up to follow any because having the dashboard clogged up annoys me. but i have found some gems, and it’s interesting to me to get a picture of someone based on this site that they curate.

12. shadowfirebird  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:05 am

Many tumblogs are indeed a random agglomeration of things that the poster fell over on the internet (with apologies to the tumbler who actually has that as a tumblog title); and at the end of the day, if they are fine with that, then that’s fine. No-one is forcing you to read it. But some of us try, with greater or (in my case) lesser success, to post to a theme or a concept.

I could make the opposite argument to yours, about blogs: that they encourage you to natter on, telling everyone what you think about things.

I see a tumblelog as more like a newspaper than a diary — and like a newspaper, its identity mostly rests in the selection of its stories. For me, this is perfect. I can treat anyone who deigns to read me as an intelligent being: instead of telling them what I think, I can show them what I have found, and leave them to draw their own conclusions.

13. Simen  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:55 am

Following good blogger etiquette, my comment turned out to be long, so I posted to my blog. Except it’s not a blog, it’s a tumblelog. Sitting there with all this original content on top. Kind of invalidates some of your points.

There is a lot to agree with in here, if you read it as pertaining to a certain class of tumblelogs, but as it stands, it’s full of overgeneralizations and “One True Way”-thinking. As a quick summary of what I wrote in the linked-to post, you’re assuming everyone uses their tumblelogs in the same way, which is wrong, and you’re drastically understating the importance of good editing, and your definition of “original content” must vary drastically from mine.

Apart from that, I’d echo dalas’s sentiments above.

14. squashed  |  December 12th, 2007 at 11:22 am

Following Simen’s example, my comment is a bit lengthy, so it can be found here.

15. Bill Israel  |  December 12th, 2007 at 11:37 am

I figured I’d throw my response into the fray as well.

http://cubicle17.com/post/21413573

You can read the post if you’d like, but it boils down to this:
Blogging is easy; content is hard. As long as you create quality content, your choice of publishing platform is irrelevant.

16. mmm  |  December 12th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

I currently have a tumbleblog and I agree with you Prashanth I switched to tumbleblogging and it’s nearly convinced me to go back to a regular blog. I agree with your points and I’m ready to follow your lead.

17. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

Hey, thanks everyone for your feedback and criticisms with your article. After reading each of your responses, I just want to clarify something:

I’m a fan of well-maintained tumblelogs, with large posts, good content, and the author shining through. However, the root of my generalizations in this article are not unfounded, I think. Such tumblelogs are rare, and through the way in which tumblelogging is portrayed and the system is set up, the author is encouraged to revert to a linkdumping mentality, because it’s just so easy. And easy, at least for me, is not fun to read.

And if you’re a proponent of using Tumblr or Soup or whatever the hell you use like this, then more power to you. I’ll stick to del.icio.us and my blog, and steer clear of your content.

Also, I’d like to note that I’m saying neither that blogs are always better nor that tumblelogs always suck. It’s just that the ways that the systems are set up that it tends to be this way. There are exceptions in both cases, and I acknowledge these. Blogging is the better platform for me, and I just figured that out, I think.

Finally, thanks everyone for actually taking the time to read this, even if you disagree with it.

18. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 7:22 pm

By the way, the wanking analogy was funny.

Tumblr Custom … smackfoo.com  |  December 12th, 2007 at 9:40 pm

[…] that perhaps tumblr is far less a tool designed to regurgitate comment alone, rather it has embraced some pretty nifty features of late that open up a range of options […]

20. Brendan  |  December 13th, 2007 at 1:53 am

Maybe 4-5 months ago, this would have a lot closer to being on the money. The days of tumblr being a den full of thieves, scum and villainy are fast disappearing.

Those who are mindlessly re-blogging kitten pictures and porn are fading out whilst those with a slightly more creative bend are discovering just what tumblr can do.

And really, the platform itself doesn’t make much of a difference. You can find the same sorts of content no matter which engine is in use.

21. SC  |  December 20th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

Glad to see your back.