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.