Tumblr

Tumblr, also known as ‘tumblr’, is a microblogging platform and social networking website that is owned and operated by Tumblr, Inc. This service allows users to post blogs, pictures, videos and other content to a short- form blog. Users are able to follow other people’s pages, as well as making their own pages private. A lot of the website’s features are accessed from the dashboard interface; this is where users have the option to post content and posts of the people they follow also appear.

David Karp founded Tumblr on April 27, 2007. Marco Arment was also a major player and served as the lead developer, but left the company in 2010 to focus on Instapaper. Within two weeks of its launch, Tumblr had over 75,000 users.

In 2009 Tumblr acquired Tumblerette, an Apple Inc. App Store application that was created by Jeff Rock and Garret Ross, and the service launched its official I Phone app. Thesite became available t BlackBerry smartphones in 2010 as well. In June 2012, Tumblr released a new version of its iOS Apple Tumblr 3.0, which allowed support for Spotify, hi- res images, and offline access.

In June 2012, Tumblr has its first major brand advertising campaign with Adidas. Adidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog page and bought placements on the user dashboard. This occurred only two month after Tumblr had announced its move towards paid advertising.

Tumblr has been able to fill the gap between Twitter, where people tweet resources, images, and thoughts, and something like WordPress, where it is a more traditional blogging platform and each post is a proper article. Tumblr is able to post text, photos, quotes, links, chats, audio, and video.

 Tumblr has been able to grow from around 300 million monthly page views in late 2009 to over 1 billion in February of 2010, which is a massive growth. (statistics below from 2010)

One of the reasons why Tumblr is growing so quickly is because of its variety of social features and how easy it is for users to adapt to. There are many clever ways in which it is possible for users to upload things to their Tumblr.

• Text blog updates from any mobile phone
• Email update via a sophisticated email publishing platform
• Bookmarklets allow users to post anything and everything they come across while browsing the web
• Post through AIM by messaging TumblrBot
• Phone TumblrBlog to leave voice posts
• Automatically post from any other site or profile
• Use the Tumblr iPhone app to update
• Third Party App’s that allow uploads

Another thing that makes Tumblr so successful is its ability to integrate two- way with other social media and networking sites. Some of their automatic postings come from YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc. Not only does Tumblr gives users the ability to pull in content live from these sites, but they are also able to send information back. For example, Facebook allows users to show their activity on Tumblr on their Facebook wall.

There are some other small features that Tumblr has that also makes it successful.

• Easily add any analytics tracking code to tumbleblog
• Tumblr is optimized for Google in everything from the site slugs to the sitemap
• Built in privacy allows users to restrict certain posts or whole page from certain people
• Able to use own custom domain to tumbleblog
• Free, and no charge for storage
• FeedBurner support allows users to see important RSS feed statistics
• Able to create custom theme 

When users are able to customize their tumbleblog, Tumblr makes it very simple for users. There is a menu bar at the top of the page that allows users to make important and useful changes that affect their site. The menu provides many options for users:

• Info: allows users to specify the basic information of the blog, such as blog title, description, and picture; there is also the ability to change the tumbleblog url
• Theme: allows users to select a theme from Tumblr's "theme garden" for users to have on their blog; there is a wide variety of different choices and most of them are free, although there are some that users can get for a small fee
• Appearance: allows users to make quick changes to their current theme, such as font, color, and background images
• Pages: allows users to create static pages; come in three categories: Standard Layout, Custom Layout, and Redirect
• Services: able to integrate with other web services such as Facebook, Youtube, Feedburner, etc. Allows users to pick and choose which services they want to use and connect all of their accounts
• Community: allows users to add a community element to the blog; users can create a page that allows readers to ask questions and users are also able to contribute their own posts based on the users submission queue approval
• Advanced: allows users to choose their timezone, url slug structure, post's per page, privacy options. etc.

Tumblr has somehow been able to find its niche between Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter. The simplicity of the user interface is one of its key components that makes it so successful. It makes blogging and sharing things that people find online easy and visibly. The popularity of Tumblr can only  increase from here on.

Blogs and Blogging

What is a Blog?

A blog is an informational website where a person (blogger) can write and post entries that are of importance to them. Posts are displayed in reverse chronological order (most recent posts appear on top), and posts on a blog are typically linked by a universal subject. Most blogs are discussion based. In other words, visitors and readers can post comments to blog posts and engage in a conversation with other readers. Readers can even subscribe to a blog or blog post to make sure they stay up to date with the conversation.

People create blogs about anything and everything. The most popular kind of blog is the kind that individuals create and treat as an personal online diary. Some of these personal blogs are topically specialized and created about a personal hobby like cooking, or fashion . Sometimes, these blogs gather a particular following, and some of these become so famous that they gain critical acclaim—for example, the blog that inspired the book and film Julie and Julia, spawned from the blog by Julie Powell, Julie/Julia Project. There are blogs that are associated with a specific organization or company and thus used as a reliable source of information for news based on this association. Some companies are even taking it a step further using blogs as a social networking device for senior management to be better in touch with their employees making them more accessible and transparent.

Blogs have a relatively short history and it really wasn’t until the past 5-10 years that its popularity really began to take off. Blogs stemmed from the online diary format and many began as manually updated websites. In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” stemming from the process of “logging the web”. The first known instance of a blog documenting through a traditional news site was in 1998 as Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer. The first most notable blog was LiveJournal, which was created in March of 1999.

Blogs have gained great popularity over the last decade. One feature that helped blogging gain such popularity was the AdSense advertising platform, launched in 2003. AdSense matches ads to the content of the blog and allows bloggers to make money from their blogs. Some of the most popular blogging sites currently include Wordpress, Tumblr, and Bloggr.

Stemmed from blogging, microblogging has also become quite popular over the past decade. A microblog is essentially a blog with a limited number of characters in each post. The most popular platform for this is twitter. In addition to being able to post pictures, videos and links, Twitter can also be integrated into other social media platforms and be fed back into a traditional blog like the ones discussed above or through other social media outlets such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

A fun representation of the evolution of the blogger is reflected in the following infographic:

Blogs have taken a strong stance in the way we get information nowadays, and as technology continues to stretch its current boundaries, it will be very interesting how blogs will develop alongside.