Are We Afraid To Do What We Want With Our Blogs?

Over on the WooThemes blog, they have an interesting discussion taking place in the comments of their most recent post discussing Tumblr. They basically want to know if their customers would pay for Tumblr specific themes. Adii prefaces the entire post though with his impressions of Tumblr.

I say the comments are interesting because I keep hearing repeated statements. “I want to use WordPress like Tumblr“, “I just want to post video or a quote“, etc. I’ll admit that one of the best things I remember about Tumblr is its bookmarklet for quickly and easily publishing content. That bookmarklet was awesome and was supposed to be the inspiration behind the new “Press This” bookmarklet but for whatever reason, it’s just not the same. The point I wanted to make though was that can’t people post videos, quotes, etc to their blogs already? Why is it that WordPress needs to be setup like Tumblr for people to publish in these ways? I mean, look at Ma.tt. Usually all he does is post a link and gets away with it on his WordPress site. I don’t see him needing Tumblr to do that.

People argue the fact that Tumblr is about microblogging and quickly posting various content types. Why can’t WordPress be used to do lengthy pieces of content while also doing short pieces of content? Is there some sort of virtual barrier on the fact that WordPress should only be used to write lengthy pieces of content?

Should I really go back to Tumblr and give it a shot for a week to get a glimpse of what all the fuss is about?