Looks like someone at Tumblr was home after all. Today is November 1st which is the date Tumblr promised would show off some new goodies while also making a few announcements. They have delivered on this promise in more than one way.
Tumblr now sports a brand new Dashboard design. Looky there! Tumblr now supports audio. Audio files can only be posted to your Tumblr account through the dashboard. The Tumblr bookmarklet currently doesn’t support the Audio feature. Tumblrs can only post one audio file per day and the file has to be under 5 MB in size.
The addition of channels. Taking a page out of Jaiku’s book, Tumblrs can now create private channels. The channels allow you to create mini cliqs within the Tumblr network. Once you invite someone into your channel, they can then invite someone else into your channel. Not exactly what I call great control, but a nifty feature none the less.
Tumblr has also teamed up with Vimeo. Vimeo users can now connect Tumblr to their account which allows them to upload videos via their phone. The theme designer has become more user friendly, there is now an archive link at the bottom of Tumblelogs that makes browsing previous posts much easer than clicking the PREVIOUS link 500 times and last but not least, Tumblr has yet to add support for Podcasting feeds.
All in all, it looks like things are starting to look up for the service. I don’t use Tumblr as much as I used to but I’m sure this update and redesign puts them back on the radar. I hope that at some point, they add a stats feature which shows me who is reblogging my Tumblr content. When the reblogging feature was implemented, it was suppose to allow Tumblrs to see how their content would spread across the network. So far, this hasn’t been the case and in this latest incarnation of Tumblr, those features are still missing.
Do you use Tumblr? If so, how do you use it? Lifestreaming? Linkblog? Your one and only blog? Let us know in the comment section.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
I’m really impressed with the new features. Is it just me though, or have they started limiting the amount of input feeds to 5 by default?
@Foomandoonian I’m not sure about the feeds. I used to have 7 feeds for my Tumblr account at one time but I have since removed them all.
I really want to try out more of the new Tumblr features. They were down mostly all day yesterday, and today I’m getting “unexpected network drops” from tumblr.com.
Quite honestly, the only feature I love is reblogging credit. I emailed Tumblr Support a long while ago, with a feature request for this. I mean, I love the fact that people can share my content to others, but I hate it when they use it to gain. For example, someone reblogged my content, and then dugg it on their site (The Author dugg it on their own site… it’s not their content!), and didn’t even put a credit link, and of course, they make $$ off of advertising, so a lot of traffic for something they didn’t write, just isn’t right.. Thankfully, Tumblr has added the credit link by default. If you click reblog now, it shows a little credit link the persons post. Now, even if it gets dugg, at least you have a link back to your site. I am SOOO glad they added this in.
The Other features are ok, but for now, that’s all I experimented with. Thanks Tumblr, your not dead!!
This was how far I got with Tumblr. Perhaps I will give it another shot though.
Am I right in that there are no RSS feeds for the channels?
I can’t find them, but the channels will be pretty useless without.
@Jon Bounds Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment Jon. Hope you’ll stick around and be part of the community here.
As for your inquiry. I went in and looked around after I Created my own channel and didn’t notice an RSS feed for it. I think the Tumblr Channel feature is at a very basic level. Maybe in the future they will bump up a few more options for that particular feature such as an RSS feed.