Earlier today we reported that Posterous, a popular minimalist blogging service, had added the ability for its users to import their Tumblr content. Tumblr is a competing ‘light blogging’ service – the market leader in fact. Other similar services include Soup.io, Noovo, Vox, Profilactic and even WordPress.com and Blogger.com are used for this purpose (although they’re more used for long-form blogging).
We’re curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.
What do we mean by ‘light blogging’? It used to be called “micro-blogging,” although that term is as much applied to Twitter as to Tumblr. Twitter is limited to 140 characters and is more of a communications tool than a publishing one. In comparison Tumblr (and Posterous et al) are publishing services. The key point is that you can publish ‘found’ things very quickly and at the click of a button. You can easily share content and media with these services.
In the example to the right, I posted a video of a band I like to my Soup.io blog by simply inputting its MySpace video embed code and adding a couple of lines of comment. Much less effort than writing a post on ReadWriteWeb 😉
Compete data shows that Tumblr is the clear leader in this market, with Posterous about to overtake Vox as number 2. Note: we didn’t include wordpress.com or blogger.com, because they are much larger than all of these and are used for different purposes too.
Here is our poll, please select the light blogging service you use most often. There are many smaller services around, so the list below is certainly not comprehensive. If yours is missing, add it to the RWW comments.