I would consider $999 way over-priced if a average designer charged it, but Metalabs are not average they’re the some of the best Tumblog designers.

$999 is not cheap at all for a Tumblr theme – have you ever looked at the code behind one? It’s basically a static site with the simplest of simple loops that you don’t even create the markup for.

Essentially it’s a PSD to Html job with a couple of additional template tags.

I like to use WP and Tumblr both and separate, mainly because I can use WP for longer articles and “meaningful” things (or… meaningfulER at least) while Tumbler is basically a more versatile version of twitter where I dump silly and fun stuff.

What I’d like to see if you peruse the idea of creating Tumblr themes is making themes that _complement_ your WP themes rather than copying them straight off. Tumblr has unique features, so does WP. I couldn’t imagine how a full port would work (I’ve tried with pretty bad results). But “paired” themes, working on the same general theme and philosophy that goes well together, now that would be something.

I’m all for consistency and having profiles on the net these days with WP/Tumblr/Twitter and god knows what in between is kinda annoying and messy, makes me feel all split without a common thread to keep myself together

Adding feeds or commentary on other things with the links, well that’s just my own addition because I write in so many places that I wanted to combine it. So I’d like to see what you come up with for tumblog-type themes, and then to see if I can add the other things I want to add to it.

What it seems like to me, the concept I would want to see, is the Facebook wall before FB went and messed it up – the thing on my company page that combined photos, videos, updates, links, etc. The big difference here is seeing it as a standalone product, not worrying about the confines of another 3rd party vendor to keep it going at their own whims.

Lifestreams (imo) serves as a central space for interested parties to recap on all of your activity across many different platforms & social networks. Tumblogs are still geared to the creation of unique content and not just syndication or aggregation.

That would be the sort of thing you’re looking at with WordPress, right? I could see this being done with categories … right now it’s changing the formatting of the post display using PHP based on the feed source (ie some excerpts are longer, some have an image, some have a link, etc). I could see this same thing being applied as categories, changing the display of the item based on the category of the post (image, link, etc) and then using tags along with it. Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe I’ll try playing around with the code of that, mashing together WP posts with the LifeStream posts to make my own “tumblog”. Am I giving you guys ideas?

Rather than develop tumblr fucntionality in WP, I urge the Woo Crew to really take a long hard look at social media conditions and the direction of blogging and to consider the central themes raised in this post and its excellent discussion when developing your new tumblogs:

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/13/the-evolution-of-blogging/

If you can provide the evolution as opposed to the amelioration of the blogging platform, then you’ll be on to something. Tough call I know. But excellence has never been easy.