Lots of conversation about Tumblr out there at the moment.

For the uninitiated, Tumblr recently released an updated version of their hosted blogging service, a dead-easy solution that really changes the way people can write / blog. In about 5 minutes, you can have a blog, and in 10 minutes you can probably get about 10 posts. It’s that easy.

It’s also pretty powerful, as Tumblr can re-publish feeds, so it can easily combine various feeds into one simple, easy to follow repository of your wanderings over the web.* It’s also very easy to follow your friends in a combined feed of their posts, almost like the mini-feed in Facebook.

Think Twitter with pictures, video, and posts longer than 140 characters. **

It is meant to be simple, stripped-down, elegant but a little raw, effective, easy to use, and quick to make you either re-think about how you blog or think about starting one. It’s a perfect example of how the tools we use impact our behaviour.

And that’s what the current conversation is focusing on at the moment. Zach and Ricky posted two of the more thoughtful critiques of Tumblr I’ve read, and if paraphrase them correctly, it’s that the ease of creating, sharing and reading content on Tumblr can lead to a lot of digital noise, a lot of content for us to digest, and that we still have yet to find the ways to balance these sharing and publishing tools into our lives, online and offline.

Personally, I believe there is no right or wrong answer; to each his or her own depending on what they want to say, how they want to say it, and how they want it to be seen (or not seen). If using Tumblr is a way to get people that would otherwise not blog to try blogging, then that’s success alone. If Tumblr gets people to share their thoughts and ideas, express themselves and join the conversation, then that’s success. If it helps us keep in touch with friends and make new relationships, that’s fantastic.

I personally hope Tumblr is not a fad; there exists plenty of room in the world for different platforms and services for people to use to fit their lives. The hardest part right now is sorting through it all and figuring out how to use these tools to better the lives of us and those around us. But as long as you’re willing to test and learn, it’s also the fun part.

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* That’s how I’m testing it at the moment, at http://www.everythingdavidson.com, a superset of these posts combined with feeds from other services I use around the web.
** Yes, of course I test Twitter, despite my wavering point of view: http://twitter.com/tdavidson