hi, with your sound reputation in the exploration of modern culture in the digital age, i'd was wondering, how one would deal with the 1000's of posted and liked posts on tumblr, all the images, articles, infographics, gifs. what would ever become of them when tumblr clearly still isn't waning. what should i do? thank you very much in advance, for the hopeful enlightenment of preference overload and digital hoarding.

Anonymous

Hi, Anon. Thanks for your note. My “sound reputation”? Oh man, sounds like news (and pressure) to me! Your question is, I think, a pretty important question but one that has its roots in taste preferences rather than tools for organizing content. What I can offer is some insight into how I organize the writing, photos and various media I find online into relevant categories for myself. Perhaps this will be useful to you? 

The first part of your question, namely the question of keeping content when Tumblr fails, is an interesting and somewhat difficult question to answer. As a CMS, Tumblr sucks. Most of who use it know this but the community on Tumblr is so great that most of us accept the tradeoff. As much as I love Tumblr, I worry about the vision of its leadership and their desire to create a platform that won’t crash and that accounts for user experience. For example, there is no way to curate content within Tumblr’s dashboard similar to the way that Tweetdeck allows you to curate Twitter content. This irritates me to no end, especially because no one at Tumblr seems to care about addressing this problem in the near future. The only solutions I’ve found are the following:

  • Import the RSS feeds of the Tumblr blogs I really love into my Google reader so that I don’t miss the content when I check into my never ending Tumblr feed. This also allows me to read the content at my leisure.
  • The posts that have music or writing I really enjoy, I bookmark or download into a file on my desktop. I then store the content to an external hard drive or folder on Dropbox.

As you can tell, I’m not really doing anything innovative or cutting edge with how I capture content. The real task is figuring out what’s worth keeping and what’s not. And that is really a question of individual taste. 
My sense is that the things that matter to you, that register with you in a meaningful way will be the things that you find a way to keep. Unless I am going through the trouble of keeping the post, etc., I assume it’s something I can do without. If anything, I tend to be really old school in how I document things I find. More often than not, I carry a small moleskine notebook with me everywhere I go and take notes. My it’s the Anthropologist in me, who knows. But generally speaking, I tend to curate my tastes in a few ways:

  • writing and other content created by people I know and care about it
  • writing and content create by people who are knowledgable in a field or fields of interest to me and whose work educates me 
  • content that truly amuses the hell out of me

But all of this is filtered through the lens of one question: Is this worth my time? Of all the things I could be doing instead of reading/watching the content I find online, is the content worth the tradeoff. So maybe that’s where you start when figuring out how to curate and filter through the digital detritis, anon?

Notes

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