I've been mucking around with my tumblelog hosted on Tumblr this weekend. If you're new to this, a tumblelog is basically...

a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. (Jason Kottke)

I have found it to be an extremely useful tool for creating a thought centre where ideas and findings are kept and sorted according to date.

Tumblr makes this terribly easy to post different findings via their control panel:

And the bookmarklet makes it even easier. For example, all I have to do is highlight text and click "Share on Tumblr" and I can place it as a quote with a link back to the site. Or post a picture and the bookmarklet will show you all the pictures on the site which you can just click to post. Simple!

But that's just the basics and still a lot of manual work on my part to keep posting. So I figured that in order to consolidate all my thoughts on one tumblelog, I'd incorporate little elements from everywhere.

This is the best part...

Tumblr allows you to incorporate RSS feeds from anywhere, so what I've done is added:

• My Twitter feeds. Only my tweets, not those I'm listening to. This helps me track what I've sent out and when.
  
• What I share on Google Reader. This is the same stuff seen to the right of this blog. I figured if it was important enough to share, it must have made an impression. So into the thought centre it goes.
• My del.icio.us bookmarks. Once again, just my own bookmarks and not the network I subscribe to.
• And last, a custom feed from a high-tech media monitoring service we have at Hill and Knowlton which I used to track the Asian mainstream media's articles on bloggers and Web 2.0.

What I don't do, although it would be cool, is incorporate my Flickr and YouTube feeds. I don't mostly because my photos and videos are often not related to my thoughts on social media, PR, or Web 2.0. But yes, you can feed them in directly as photos and videos. Cool eh?

So there you go, my personal thought centre. My plan, although I haven't really done it yet, is to consolidate my thoughts on this platform and use it to plan future blog posts. If you're an alpha geek (or competitor), you might like to get into my head early and checkout my thought process before it gets organised on this blog.

So feel free to jump into Ben's public thought stream at http://eok.tumblr.com and let me know if anything else should be added in.