Hey there!
I’m trying to revive an old art website and recently thought of using Tumblr as a way of promoting it, because Tumblr’s unique audience seemed in line with who I wanted to invite to my site. Tumblr, as I’ve learnt, considers itself a ‘microblogging’ site.
So I tried it out, and after a little while, I ran into a couple challenges. First, commenting on Tumblr is tricky, so the traditional way we’re used to thinking of online discussions (commenter posts, OP replies, someone else chimes in) doesn’t happen. Instead, second, the primary way of interacting on Tumblr seems to be to ‘re-blog’ other people’s posts, adding your two-cents below.
So that’s fine within Tumblr, because that’s what the culture of the website is, but I found myself feeling constrained by its limitations and wanting to instead create a proper blog (Wordpress, etc.) so I could have real discussions.
So here’s my question. What are the ethics, considerations and etiquette, when it comes to ‘re-blogging’ things onto a ‘real’ blog? Certainly I intend to mostly write original content, but there are cool posts, cartoons and the like, from Tumblr and other sites that I’d love to show to my audience too.
From a legal standpoint, would that be considered fair use? Or would it be copyright infringement?
Then, apart from the legals, would it be considered proper form, or in bad taste, to do that type of thing?