Conversations is my online scrapbook in which I put bits and pieces without thinking in terms of posts:

I use conversations to post stuff I come across, which I want to both share with others and to ideas (eg., mimesis) that I can come back to latter for longer blog posts.

There is an article on Tumblr at American Prospect by Marisa Meltzer called the Curated Web that explores Tumblr's Web site own analogy: "If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks." She highlights Tumblr's "reblog" button that allows one tumblelog's content to be shown on another.

Meltzer says that it takes a classic function of blogs -- highlighting and linking to the work of other bloggers -- and makes it instantaneous, eliminating even the need to copy and paste.There is no "stealing" words or images, only reblogging. Hence the idea of an online community and it iths built-in community -- a more formal linkage than most traditional blogs have -- that leads to Tumblr's focus on curation.

Scrapbook is a good idea for tumbleblogs as these are personal sites: what people use the platform to post stuff they find of interest to them. It's low maintenece. Meltzer however is more interested in the emergence of a micro-communities out of tumbleblogs:

At its best, Tumblr is a sort of modern-day zinemaking. Zines, self-published do-it-yourself magazines (often featuring photos and text cut from other magazines and photocopied) with limited distribution, have always been a part of underground culture, both as a product and as a galvanizing part of the community. As in the zine world, activists and weirdos alike thrive in their Tumblr microcommunities, posting photos of signs that read "Feminism Is for Lovers" or collages of child stars. Blogs have been accused of killing off zines (though they are still being produced), and tumblelogs seem to channel the spirit of zines more so than any long-form blog.....Tumblr at its worst is even more casual and careless than the wider blogosphere.