Malcolm Bastien

Reblogging - Not So Much

Been feeling recently as I look over my Tumblr stream that reblogging is both a really good idea, and something that is a big crap-shoot to whether it improves my Tumblr experience or adds less desirable stuff to my stream.

Of course sharing interesting content in a more active way than just Liking a post is a great idea, it makes a lot of sense to help move content around on this massive platform, but when you see things that are 4x reblogged it gets ridiculous.

I don’t know what to say about reblogging besides I think it’s a bit more logical that maybe it’s the implementation that reblogs a post in it’s entirety that is too much. Or maybe it’s even the idea that people reblogging other people’s reblogs that adds that visual overhead to it.

In the end the only reason I bring it up is because Tumblr makes it so easy to reblog stuff that it’s easier to populate your own blog with rebloged content then original stuff. When I look at my Posterous Reader it’s a vastly different experience, and the largest reason for that is absolutely because there is more original content.

Share Your Data

A couple friends and I do this, but I’m sad that it wasn’t my idea and that it took us so long to do as a collective.

We share our Google Analytics data with each other for our various blogs and websites.

It’s been so far a great way for us to dive into different sets of data and look at how each of our sites, with different themes and audiences attract different users, that behave differently, and grow the possibilities for us to see something insightful where we can then we can actually recommend something to do.

Most of the time though, it’s just the finding of neat things out about your friends sites (sites that they put so much time into over the years that they run them). It’s neat to see which of your friends articles generated a lot of traffic, because you were there with them as they asked you for feedback on those ideas and they shared the links out when they finally published.

If you have a bunch of friends with websites, blogs, tumblrs, posterous pages, try sharing the analytics data for those sites with them. It’s a great learning source, and just a fun topic of discussion.

If me and my friends are sharing iTunes libraries over a local network, can we temporarily merge the libraries together in some fashion so say Genius will jump back and forth and play songs that are similar?