Newer types of blogs

Ever since blogs took off in India, there seems to be a trend about which hosting client people use. The majority uses the Google site Blogger, and some try Wordpress.

Experimenting
But the other day, I was tempted to start a new blog and I decided to go with Tumblr ( www.tumblr.com ). My product blog was going to be just photos and captions and I wanted somewhere that would make it easy to post and look good at the same time. I fiddled around with Wordpress, but it didn't look as dynamic, so I checked out some of the other picture caption blogs.

Tumblr at first glance looks a lot like Digg or Delicious, but it boasts about being the 'new face of blogging', micro blogging with a difference. It's not quite Twitter, there is no character limit, but it's geared towards people who want to upload short, pithy posts outside the traditional blog space.

The themes were gorgeous, even the free ones (and if you've used Blogger, you know the free templates there haven't changed in years). Plus there are loads of easy sharing buttons. You can 'like' someone's post or reblog it. And set it up so each time you post something on another site, it gets posted on your Tumblr blog. It makes sharing very easy and has a great email and mobile posting interface, and the best part was that you can choose to make just some posts private.

Breath of fresh air
It's quite new compared to the other clients and I think the users are mostly from the US for now, but each Tumblr blog I visited made me marvel in terms of design and usability.

It looks sophisticated and new and trendy, making my old Blogger blog feel like something old people would use. If you're thinking of starting a new blog and you don't write loads and loads of prose, I'd highly recommend that you jump on this bandwagon.

Meenakshi writes a blog at the compulsiveconfessor. blogspot.com. Send her your queries at meenakshimadhavan@gmail.com