Tumblr’s Next Post Format: ★★★★★
Until recently, Tumblr has allowed its users to post text, photos (photosets), video, audio, quotes and conversations. Recently though, the Tumblr team added the ability to include questions and answers a la Formspring.
I’m sure Marco and David, as well as the rest of the smart people over at Tumblr have talked about the these post formats at length and have considered some other logical containers into which Tumblr users could post and organize their data. In just fifteen minutes of brainstorming, I’ve come up with a few: documents, slide presentations, lists, and interviews/FAQ’s.
One of my ideas stood out above the rest. What about reviews? People are constantly talking about the latest films, books, and consumer electronics on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. I think Tumblr would benefit from a post type in which the author could assign a number from one star (★☆☆☆☆) to five stars (★★★★★) and post a review of anything that has a title and/or a link. The review type should have the title of the work being reviewed, an optional description and a clickthrough link if you specify one, or if you decide to review things using the bookmark. I love the way Kottke does his movie reviews, and I think some Tumblr themes could really take advantage of the new review type to generate a really nice table that linked to the reviews with descriptions.
With sites like GoodReads, Readernaut, RottenTomatoes, and Flixter on the rise, the concept of reviews has never been more pertinent or more important for a personal publishing platform like Tumblr. While it would be easy to complicate this feature and ask for things like ISBN numbers or IMDB links, I think the simple extensibility of reviewing anything would work best with Tumblr’s philosophy and users. As long as you can name it, you can review it. Why not?
Tumblr could also do some really interesting things, like finding the average review of everything with the same title and/or link to generate a picture of what the whole Tumblr community thinks of a given piece of media and clustering things on the Radar around certain media types. Don’t even get me started on the type of humor and memes this would spawn, but I think it is the most legitimate option for a new post type that the Tumblr community would truly embrace. As always, just an idea.
