Reid Dossinger

It’s moving time again. After giving dumb ol’ Blogger another chance, I’ve rejected it again. It’s partly because, in spite of their recent changes, it still feels…old fashioned, somehow. Maybe it’s just my long, turbulent history with them, but it feels like a place for longer posts only. Every time I went there, I just didn’t feel like I had enough to say.

I’ve come to like Tumblr a lot more recently since I started using it as a substitute for Google Reader shares. It seems a lot more forgiving of multiple posts a day, succinct thoughts, more forgiving of duplicate content (just due to the format), and mostly, a lot easier to post a link and some quick thoughts on it.

I thought about going back to Posterous, but the link sharing just wasn’t as good. So here we are. Tumblr. Lots of work to do, mostly on this template, but…that’s the fun part, right?

The social sharing world has seemed bleak for those of us who found the shared items in Google Reader to be the single best place to read and discuss the news. But I’ve found a little light lately in turning to Tumblr as a way to share links and pictures and allow discussion on said articles.

It’s easy to set up. Get a Tumblr in shape and then:

1. Add Tumblr to the Send To button (Reader Settings > Send To). This will take the place of the “Share with note” functionality.
2. Go get the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet at the Tumblr Goodies page. This will let you share any article you find. 
3. To get the commenting experience, sign up for Disqus, create a new site and then enter the shortcode into your Tumblr.

Those things will let you share to Tumblr as easily as you did to Reader. 

Of course, Tumblr still pales in comparison to Reader, if only because Reader allowed you to have all shared articles AND comments in the same place where you were reading your usual articles. And one of the great things about Reader is that you were usually able to read the entire article without having to leave Reader. But it still scratches that sharing itch, and adds in features that you couldn’t get in Reader shared items, like Analytics and the ability to connect external services like Instagram.

As a side note, I’ve been liking Tumblr a lot, but there’s still room for improvement. A better dashboard is sorely needed, the text editor needs a larger window space, and although the templates are among the best of the free blogging platforms, a lot of them are unpredictable and buggy. But I’ve been liking the ease of posting and ability to customize template enough so that I’ve started considering moving this blog to Tumblr.

UPDATED to put in the part about adding in your Disqus to allow commenting. An essential part!

You may have seen a few things around today telling you that you should help stop censorship and that there’s a law in congress that might pass, and if you heard blah blah blah, let me just tell you now that it’s absolutely worth your time if you believe that you should be able to post freely on sites like Google, Tumblr and Facebook.

Go to americancensorship.org to get the facts and send a letter to your representative. Hell, I did it, and my representative doesn’t even get to vote (related: DC VOTING RIGHTS NOW!).

Is there a possibility that the bleak outlook that internet companies are putting forward where content is shut down at a whim possibly huge overstatement? Yeah, it’s a possibility. But at the very least, I’m not willing to take the risk of a world where ISPs and copyright owners are dictating the content of the internet.

That said…as many times as I’ve been on the side of illegal downloader (or even provider) of copyrighted material, I’ve also been the person having to get people to take down copyrighted material posted illegally. And while it doesn’t anger me at all that people have posted this stuff (the vast majority of the time, it’s done out of simple sharing, ignorant to laws and not in spite of them), it’s shocking how difficult it is to get sites like Scribd to remove obviously copyrighted works. To post it illegally, you upload it. To get it taken down legally, you have to provide a list of the works and provide an email with official legal language AND send a copy via snail mail. It’s much more difficult to protect your works than it is to provide copyrighted works to millions.

A lot has changed in the last few years. For example, record labels very rarely send takedown notices anymore, and in fact, find who has posted their work and offer more mp3s from their label’s roster. And so I would much rather see a world where owners of copyrighted materials offer their works in ways that are convenient to ways that benefit everyone rather than having laws that throw out a ton of great content with the effort to overprotect copyrights.