My love affair with open source blog software Wordpress has ended and I have now been seduced by younger, thinner, low maintenance Tumblr. 

The beauty of Tumblr is in the dashboard, which doubles as as a mini-feed reader and a pretty little web based control panel, from where you can read other Tumble-logs (people you "follow") and update your blog.

Updating the blog is incredibly easy, as it is just a line of icons from where you can post text or multimedia content. Anyone who's spent time fighting with Wordpress, trying to get it to just embed a Youtube link, will appreciate the ease with which you can post to Tumblr. 

For you webmistresses and CSS freaks: yes, you can easily customize the look of your Tumblr and embed it into your domain if you want to party that way. If you're like me and enjoy starting multiple blogs for multiple million dollar ideas, starting and running numerous blogs is incredibly easy.

I've often thought of Tumblr as the "new Livejournal" and while they don't have the extensive community and privacy features that LJ offers, it still offers a particularly compelling community or, as Valleywag puts it, "Brooklyn and San Francisco's most self-involved Internet users".

The way Tumblr does this is through the "re-blog", an easy way to post something that you see on other blogs that you'd like to post to your blog. You are alerted to reblogs on your dashboard and you can continue the conversation that way and meet new people.

The biggest detractor to Tumblr is that they don't have very many privacy features, "friends only" entries that are common on Livejournal or Vox aren't included and there is no ability to block users you don't like from re-blogging for following you.

This particular feature has inspired a rash of mean, anonymous Tumblrs that exist solely to make fun of other, more popular Tumblrs - which is not a new concept to the Internet, but certainly one that is made easier by Tumblr's "re-blog" feature. Users do have the ability to start private group blogs, but other than that, what you put on Tumblr is for the whole world to see, baby!