Bliss! nationalgeographicdaily: Inishowen, IrelandPhoto: Dave Johnston Morning sun touches the hills and sand dunes of Inishowen, Ireland.
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Bliss!

nationalgeographicdaily:

Inishowen, Ireland
Photo: Dave Johnston

Morning sun touches the hills and sand dunes of Inishowen, Ireland.

Source: nationalgeographicdaily

The mystery of Superman’s disguise has been solved. Its in the curl, not the glasses! nevver: See Mike Draw
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The mystery of Superman’s disguise has been solved. Its in the curl, not the glasses!

nevver:

See Mike Draw

Source: nevver

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Anyone know where this music comes from?

I am doing some research relating to Creative Commons licenses in a commercial context and noticed our very own Max Kazen’s smiling face flash past in a banner inviting visitors to the site to support Creative Commons. Max is Creative Commons South Africa’s Project Lead.
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I am doing some research relating to Creative Commons licenses in a commercial context and noticed our very own Max Kazen’s smiling face flash past in a banner inviting visitors to the site to support Creative Commons. Max is Creative Commons South Africa’s Project Lead.

At the moment my blogs are somewhat fragmented. After a brief (partially successful) attempt to migrate all my personal blogs to the awesome Squarespace, I reversed course and pretty much decided to stick with this Tumblr blog and my long-standing WordPress blog which is in dire need of a theme revamp. I’ve spent the weekend changing name servers so my WordPress blog probably won’t be available for another day or so. I was looking forward to migrating to Squarespace. The customization options are awesome and its a terrific platform (web.tech.law is on Squarespace and I am very happy with the site). Unfortunately it seems my other blog is too big to migrate easily and my hack (splitting up the export files and importing them) only led to more complexity. Squarespace converted all my tags to categories and I am not wasting days converting or deleting hundreds of what should be tags.
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At the moment my blogs are somewhat fragmented. After a brief (partially successful) attempt to migrate all my personal blogs to the awesome Squarespace, I reversed course and pretty much decided to stick with this Tumblr blog and my long-standing WordPress blog which is in dire need of a theme revamp. I’ve spent the weekend changing name servers so my WordPress blog probably won’t be available for another day or so.

I was looking forward to migrating to Squarespace. The customization options are awesome and its a terrific platform (web.tech.law is on Squarespace and I am very happy with the site). Unfortunately it seems my other blog is too big to migrate easily and my hack (splitting up the export files and importing them) only led to more complexity. Squarespace converted all my tags to categories and I am not wasting days converting or deleting hundreds of what should be tags.

I really like this photo. It’s my new lock screen photo on my phone.
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I really like this photo. It’s my new lock screen photo on my phone.

Still infatuated with Tumblr

Even though I am leaning more in favour of using Google+ for my micro-blogging (and even my not-so-micro-blogging), Tumblr is far better looking and is far more visually appealing. I want to want to blog here a lot more, blog here primarily!

Wow, doesn’t Evernote Clearly look like a Readability clone? Even down to the sidebar on the right.

Source: evernote.com

My not so great Tumblr versus Google+ debate

Never mind the Google+ vs Facebook vs Twitter debate, there are pretty strong similarities between Google+ and Tumblr and Posterous. I used to use Posterous and Tumblr depending on my mood and closed down my Posterous site when I realised I didn’t really have a need for it given my preference for Tumblr anyway. Besides, I have a long standing WordPress blog which seems to keep ticking along and I keep thinking that is a wasted resource I should be tapping.

And then along comes Google+ and I lost myself in it for a couple weeks before emerging with a new appreciation for Twitter and Facebook and their different roles in my social Web experience. I posted a couple more times to Tumblr, tempted to finally just migrate there fully but then I would be abandoning my main blog at http://pauljacobson.org which has a larger following and has a history to it. It is basically my first real blog which I created in December 2006 and took through various incarnations in the last 5 years. That said, I still wonder just how important a long form blog is where so much sharing is on a much smaller and more dynamic scale. I haven’t exactly blogged consistently so my blog’s value to my readers has somewhat diminished in comparison to Twitter, Facebook (for personal stuff) and Google+.

Anyway, back to Tumblr. Tumblr appeals to me pretty strongly. I follow a number of blogs which I enjoy and its really easy to share posts I come across and which appeal to me. I haven’t really felt motivated to work at my Tumblr blog because its been more of a hobby to me than a serious blogging tool. Its fun, creative, inspiring. When it comes to meaningful engagement, Tumblr is a metaphorical dusty street in an old Western town complete with tumbleweed.

Aside from the lack of the sort of formatting options that are available to blogging platforms like Tumblr, Google+ has proved to be almost as capable as Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook (combined) for sharing and engagement. Granted you are pretty much locked into the Google ecosystem unless you use 3rd party browser extensions to share beyond Google+, you can still share stuff pretty easily and enjoy pretty active engagements at the same time. What Google+ does do that you can’t really do with Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter is export your Google+ data using what appear to be open standards and theoretically import that data into a compatible system. In Tumblr’s context, that is a big deal for me. I never liked the virtual lock-in you have to accept with Tumblr (thank goodness for WooThemes’ tumblr2wp service which enables you export your Tumblr blog to WordPress very effectively).

So here I am having a relatively meaningless (in the grander scheme of things) and very 21st century debate about whether I should bother maintaining my better looking and relatively independent Tumblr blog? Or should I just use Tumblr purely to consume content and switch to Google+ for the non-personal/family oriented sharing (Facebook still has that side of my social experience locked down because all my friends and family are there, not on Google+)?

As I type this I am leaning more towards Google+ for that sort of sharing going forward but tomorrow is a new day and I tend to change my mind a lot when debating these sorts of things. What do you think?