Please explain Tumblr to me . . .

Tumblr really only helps if you are heavy on the graphics. It succeeds for many of the same reason Pinterest does: a picture is worth a thousand words.

The best thing that drives blog traffic is regular new content. And by regular I mean daily.

If you REALLY want traffic you try to get picked up by HuffPo's blog roll or similar. You've got the cred to get in there if you wanted to wok it.

It's a good strategy. Cross post to as many sites as you can especially if your blog autoposts. I stopped Tumblr because my subject matter wasn't a good fit. I suspect yours is better, especially if you attract Y's and Ethan's crowd etc. I auto post to Facebook and Twitter and they generate a decent mount of traffic. I manually posted to Google+ but that's been a waste of time. G+ is a deserted island.

Tumblr allows animated gifs, which makes it about 1000x better than Facebook based on that alone.

I like the idea of Tumblr a lot more than the actual site. After a while, things get incredibly repetitive unless you're constantly following new and different types of people. The other issue is that it seems to discourage original text-based posts in favour of images. That said, I don't think the original function of the place was to give long-winded bloggers a home.

Think of it like a cross between a blog and twitter. It's usually more short-form than a blog, and also heavily relies upon "retweeting" and following others and such.

It's kind of a strange beast, but for something short form and image heavy, it's great.

I have about 10,000 photos from the internet saved on my computer and about half of them (or maybe many more) come from tumblrs. I love it. I usually spend at least 15-30 minutes a day looking at photos.

And I think that's a good call. Your blog is more long-form, which is exactly what blogging does best.

No reason not to keep cross posting it to Tumblr to get extra pageviews though

Yes, it is much less about the back and forth, the discussion. Which I suppose is great in some cases, but it's definitely not ideal for all.

I will say that tumblr has a nice feature where people can ask you questions and you can answer them on the blog. That's pretty nice. But I wouldn't call it a discussion--I'm sure it'd be 90% "what should I wear to a wedding/interview/funeral/whatever" in your case.

For what you have been posting, and what you have said you want to do, I definitely think a traditional blog is more appropriate. Someone like Vox, I can see why tumblr makes sense for what he wants to do--he can just put what he wants out there (tons of pics, mostly, or very short-form text), take it or leave it.

Engendering comments is hard. It seems to work best where there is a community with critical mass. First online forums then Facebook... keeping them going is hard, people get board and their interests drift... Facebook is seeing that now. Pinterest hasn't even tried to develop commenting.

Tumblr pretty insular as well... actually most communities are... To get more comments on Wordpress, for example, the best method is to comment on other blogs... but then you're still limited to the blog community and those most active versus those with deep interest in your topic.