About Tumblr

     Tumblr is a tool for creating microblog and a social networking site. It was founded in 2007 and now, it has more than 220 million blogs.

     Tumblr’s first feature is to easily create a small blog. In Tumblr, we can post all kinds of materials, such as text, photo, quote, link, audio, and video. It is very simple to use and easy to customize blogs because its user interface is basic and clear. Moreover, it has great feature of automatic editing. We can modify a blog by simply choosing a template and once this setting has been saved, every past post will have the same template. In addition, when we chose my template or color, we can see how it looks like simultaneously. It reduces the time to layout and to set the color scheme in Tumblr. This is one of the great advantages because we can choose many designs and try again and again. It can be really fun.

     There is another feature of Tumblr: Following and social networking. This is same as Facebook and twitter. If I follow someone’s blog, his or her blog post show up in my dashboard. As a result, we can see other bloggers posts and those who hit “like” and “reblogged”. These are similar function of “like ” and “retweet” in twitter.

      In terms of public sectors use, I followed the blog of White House. This is very simple and easy to read because it uses many pictures, links and captions are short. It looks very different from traditional government site and attractive for many people to read. Since it contains links to some pages from government sites, it is a good way to make them more accessible for Internet users. In addition, it has question function. We can ask question to the White House directly. In fact, they respond to some of the questions. For example, “What advice do you have for a collegestudent who dreams of working in the White House one day?” White house answered that white house internship is one way to start. This is one of the direct communication ways between government and citizens. However, having such kind of social media site requires a person to do the maintenance such as updating the information or responding to questions. This is one big problem for the government to maintain this social media tools. But for me, I guess the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages.