written by: Amani Liggett

A Tumblr Dashboard

Facebook’s glory days are fading. Yes, it’s true. The giant of social media has gotten, well, crowded. Parents are on it, grandparents are on it, and employers use it to decide whether to hire someone.

For the rest of us, it’s time to find a new playground. Many have found this in Tumblr, a blogging and picture based social media website. Tumblr is much more informal, and one can be as secretive or as intimate as you may desire. There is no pressure here to add all of your family members, the kid from math class, or your dentist.

And unfortunately for Facebook, Tumblr is more fun. Users are rarely bombarded by ads, or asked to join groups or play any sort of Farmville-type games.

Members of the Tumblr community often poke fun at each other and themselves, which helps make the website feel nonthreatening. Users often lament their exaggerated bad habit of staying online all day and all night, making anyone who reads the post feel a little better about their own over-use of the computer. You stay up until 4am watching re-runs on Hulu too?

And of course, they make fun of Facebook, mainly for the previously mentioned reasons. Its too boring, too old, too frumpy, too packed-full of a million different things happening on the sidebar.

Tumblr is also full of rants on every topic available. Users write essay-length comments and responses on topics ranging from the seriousness of abortion to the silliness of different Hogwarts house characteristics. It certainly is a fun and easy way to find other fans of books, movies, and TV shows. Finding someone on Facebook who also happens to like Green Day, Shakespeare jokes, and Sherlock Holmes would be far more challenging than on Tumblr.

There is a sense of community on Tumblr that Facebook does not have and probably will never be able to attain at this point. Facebook got very big, very fast, so there is no sense of a unique space because everyone is already there. Tumblr is the new alternative.

That is the way of social media, for a while, Myspace was king, and then fell to Facebook, which itself is now going downhill. Facebook is clearly going to have to step-up its game to stay on top. With the uprising of Tumblr and other less-well-knowns, as well as dissenters complaining of Facebook’s frequent changes (the new Timeline feature is not going over well) and controversial privacy rules, the giant is in trouble.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Social Media News, Tumblr

Can you feel the rumble moving across the Net? Is it a server malfunction? The train outside your tiny apartment? No, it’s a band of bloggers swarming across the Sphere, bringing truth and justice to the top ranks of your google search! The now widely used Blogswarm is another tool used in social media to raise awareness of important news and issues.

But what is a blogswarm, and how does it work? A blogswarm happens when groups of bloggers, out of urgent need or pre-arranged agreement, all write posts about the same issue and urge others to write.  Recently we had a  ’swarm where bloggers encouraged people to contact their representatives and ask them to vote yes on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.  That was motivated by situational need. In other cases, a specific day of the year will come around, and folks will agree to write posts on a topic that’s close to their hearts. For example, May 1st was Blog Against Disablism Day, where people write about disability issues.  It’s been going on since 2006.

Do BlogSwarms really help? Yes. And just as important, they’re a ton of fun! You get to join together with others across the blogosphere, and for one day everyone has the same goal: get more people to care/understand/do something about X, Y, or Z. There’s also alot of freedom in it, because everyone crafts their own message, as long as the end result is the same. A ‘swarm is a great way to reach down into the pool of information we all wade through, pull one thing out, and let the Net World know that a lot of people think this is worth knowing about.

Try it for yourself! There’s plenty of ‘swarms out there waiting for another blogger to join the pack. Or set up your own swarm day! Choose a date and topic, post about it, send links out to other bloggers, and let the word fly! A blogswarm is one more tool we have for keeping folks connected to what’s going on around them.