There’s an awful lot of excitement these days about Tumblr, which is now attracting 400 million pageviews/day and 8.4 billion pageviews/month. The buzz around Tumblr has been cranked up by people such as Steve Rubel, who recently decided to abandon his blogs to embrace Tumblr, calling it the “next great social network”.

But here’s the thing: Tumblr may be described as a micro-blog or a quasi-blog but it’s not a blog and, as a result, it shouldn’t been seen as a replacement for a blog.

Instead, Tumblr is a wonderful and valuable complement to a blog because it offers another way to publish and share content using a platform that is user-friendly and, of course, increasingly popular.

In my case, I’m using Tumblr to share content that isn’t quite right or not a good fit for my blog but, nevertheless, has some value or strikes me as interesting. As a result, it’s a place where I publish photos (a recent one featured a new Krispy Kreme Doughut Cafe), info-graphics about social media and the Web, and stuff on the Web I find interesting such as cool sign-up forms. I guess in a sense it’s a personal/professional life-stream platform.

Unlike Rubel, there is no way I would abandon my blog to exclusively use Tumblr. Here’s why:

1. When you use Tumblr, the content is posted on their platform so you don’t have complete control. On the other hand, a blog is personal or corporate asset that you can control, move, etc.

2. While Tumblr does provide a fair degree of flexibility, it doesn’t have the developer or design ecosystem that WordPress offers.

3. A blog can be tightly integrated into a Web site, providing a lot of SEO goodness that a standalone platform such as Tumblr.com can’t offer.

For thoughts on Tumblr vs. a blog, check out this post from Spin Sucks.