Robyn’s got a fair request for Tumblr. In addition to our blogging requests, this one is about making sure you don’t miss great content from other bloggers.
Ever search for a topic on Tumblr and notice that one blog consistently posts under the given category? Yes? Do you ever think, Hey, I should follow this person, launch their blog and realize you already are?
It then occurs to you that despite already following them, they never appear on your dashboard because most of their posts appear while your not online, right?
Much like Twitter, you take a chance that when you dip into the stream you’ll not just get something great to read, but you won’t miss anything great from someone you’re following. There are always those select followers that you don’t want to miss, but it’s real hard for the cream to rise to the top when all you have is a date based feed. And, as Robyn suggests, it’s just not possible to follow everyone individually. Facebook’s done some work to prioritize people you connect with more often. I’d like to see a main feed from Tumblr and then a feed based on some smarts around the articles I’ve liked/clicked on.
This also brings us back to group blogs like this one. People can follow us, but I can’t follow them back from the group blog. Might make us look ungrateful, but there’s simply no option for it. Right now you only have one Tumblr dashboard with a single feed, but if I Need Sugar is about music, and Say Yeah is about design, then it would make sense if I could start to create feeds around these topics and follow people from a group blog to automatically add to these feeds. (You know, groups.) Right now my personal feed is full of photography and pulp culture stuff because the kids post more than the designy types. And while you can track tags on your dashboard, that’s still not quite as specific as organizing by blog or directly assigning a topic to a blog. As Robyn suggests, groups could solve this and really help us stay connected with our fellow designy types.