If you are like me, you quite probably won’t read this because your attention span is similar to that of a freshly hatched fruit fly.

That’s why the good people of Tumblr have created their service: It caters to the ones with no attention span whatsoever and to those who just can’t be bothered to turn every idea, link, photo, video, conversation or quote into a full-fledged blog posting anymore.

Now, if I haven’t lost you yet, you are indeed not like me, but I’ll still show you what Tumblr does. Basically, it’s a blog hosting service (complete with your own subdomain or even the option of using your own domain name), but the whole setup adheres to the principle of the tumblelog. From the Wikipedia article:

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

So, here’s the good news: Using Tumblr, you are relieved of the burden of adding witty commentary to everything you post. The bad news? It can get really messy, and people just may get bored by no commentary at all.

The good people at Tumblr probably anticipated that, that’s why in addition to simple text and link postings, they added a template for conversations. And this, my friends, really can add a lot of personality to your tumblelog. Just take a look at the conversation I posted yesterday on my very own log at Tumblr:

As you can see, the possibilities to wow your audience are endless. Here’s what the backend looks like:

Obviously very clean, very simple.

Overall, a tumblelog seems to be a very good idea. When usually I’d just let certain links, photos, quotes and whatnot slip, simply because I couldn’t be bothered to actually comment on them, Tumblr now provides me and everybody else with a template that’s perfect for the lazy blogger. And the way it’s implemented, it may well become as fun as blogging once was.

Knallgrau, Austrian creators of blogging software twoday, have now released Blogr, a new multimedia blogging tool.

The tool supports a whole lot of languages already, and is also available in quite a few top level domains. So, if you don’t mind a Spanish interface, why not set up an account with Blogr.com.mx? (There is a section in the settings area of an account that’s called “language”, but there’s nothing there yet…so until that’s fixed, language seems to be tied to TLD.)

The name already suggests what niche the service is supposed to fill (and I mentioned it in the intro paragraph, so…): multimedia blogging. Which I understand to be spicing up a normal blog with photos and videos (and they do too). They offer rather basic functionality, for both blogging and their multimedia features, but in Knallgrau tradition, everything is very tidy and polished.

Once signed up, your content can be accessed via a subdomain, in my case richard.

Since it’s all about multimedia, the first thing to look at is their uploading mechanism:

It’s basic browser uploading, but gives you more uploading slots if you need them. There’s also the tried and tested upload per email, which I think will come in handy for those who like uploading from their cameraphones. And there’s a desktop client available, but it’s Windows only, and I couldn’t be bothered to try it out.

Their blogging back-end is quite easy to use, and although it appears to be basic, it incorporates cool stuff like automatic tag suggestions:

The heart of the service is their mediastream, from which you can choose what to put where. They divide the files into videocasts and photos, which shows that they are really out looking for those videocasters. I wasn’t able to find out what their storage-limit looks like, but I guess if they want to attract serious vloggers, the limit shouldn’t be too low.

The interface to the whole thing is very web2.0, including rounded corners, giant fonts and an apparent allusion to Flickr, prototypical and insanely successful web2.0 photo service. Fortunately, that stuff will take a long time to get old.

For the front-end, i.e. the area visible to people visiting your Blogr area, there are three different designs available. There’s a very simple default Blogr layout, the second one is the famous and oft-used Kubrick template, and the third one is one of the default layouts for their twoday.net blogging service. Switching between those is as easy as checking a box:

Overall, Blogr is an already very polished product (although still in alpha), and looks like the perfect solution for people who want to jump right into multimedia blogging without having to worry about setting up a blog themselves.

But Blogr is not alone, as there are quite a few companies who are pushing into that market (most notably lifelogger, or blinklife), but none of them with such a dedicated videocasting angle like Blogr.