The FJP

A Very Big List of Very Good Tumblrs

You told LJ about over 390 of your favorite Tumblrs. Here they are, from most to least popular:

thelifeguardlibrarian, with 29 mentions

libraryjournal, with 16 mentions

fishingboatproceeds, with 13 mentions (sorry John Green, Kate & LJ won this battle)

librarianproblems, with nine mentions

nypl, with six mentions

oupacademic

schoollibraryjournal

todaysdocument

motherjones, with five mentions

neil-gaiman

slaughterhouse90210

theatlantic

theparisreview

therumpus

betterbooktitles, with four mentions

bookriot

chicagopubliclibrary

darienlibrary

doctorwho

edwardspoonhands

ilovecharts

johndarnielle

laura-in-libraryland

libraryadvocates

mentalflossr

nprfreshair

shortformblog

theartofgooglebooks

unypl

wilwheaton

Read More

FJP: What a great list of Tumblrs. Some we know, others that we look forward to following.

Also, thanks to whoever recommended The FJP. If you squint just right you can see us down among the small print.

And, if you’ve made it this far, programming note: The first FJP photo contest is going on. We’re accepting submissions on Facebook until May 31. Details and contest page here.

MySpace was where you went in the past, WordPress and Movable Type were where people went if they had the patience and writing output to maintain a traditional blog, Facebook was where you went to define yourself by schools and checkboxes, and Tumblr was where you went to make your own identity and express your creativity.

Marco Arment (one of Tumblr’s early developers) in a nice little ode to David Karp and Tumblr, on Tumblr’s history and why he’s hopeful about Yahoo’s acquisition. If you’re still wary about the whole deal, it’s a nice read.

Permalink
85

We Promise Not to Screw

Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT.

Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

We promise not to screw it up.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, announcing the company’s agreement to acquire Tumblr. On Tumblr, of course. Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

FJP: We’re wary, but let’s hope so.

Permalink
83

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr?

All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition:

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding:

Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale.

While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot.

From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation.

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.:

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you:

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Sweet.

Tumblr Question

The FJP is a group Tumblr and for the longest time it’s frustrated me that we either can’t, or I haven’t figured out how, to see the rest of a response someone makes when replying to one of our posts.

Maybe it’s a Group Blog thing, maybe its me not figuring out the right keystroke, but gotta ask: how do you see a Reply in its entirety?

And while I’m at it, why can’t you reply back and carry on a conversation?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Oh, and since I won’t be able to see a complete Reply, tips and tricks will be appreciated through the Ask box. — Michael

UPDATE: One person says the complete reply comes in through your notes. Unfortunately, not on a group blog.

Permalink
15

Rediscovering Tumblr with Tumby

Last fall I began talking with Robert Buckley about a startup he founded called Tumby.

At a high level, this is a Tumblr discoverability platform to help Users sift and sort through topics of interest with greater precision than, say, Tumblr’s “ Explore Page”. Buckley believes that Tumblr is a “treasure trove of awesome content” and his goal is to innovate and deliver tools that help Users “discover, enjoy, and share” it quickly and easily.

While the Explore Page works for posts chosen by editors tagged within a category (eg., LOL, Art, Food, Vintage, etc.), Tumby shifts the control back to you. Tumby lets you create lists of Tumblrs who create content specific to your interests and put them in one or more topic categories you choose. This helps with your focus, as well as making sure you don’t miss posts that might be important to you but passed you on your Tumblr dashboard. You get control of topics and post types with built-in filtering mechanisms too.

You can do this two ways: as curated list called a “TumbyLand” (here’s one for /r/tumblr on reddit) or with a personalized list called a “myTumbyLand”. In both cases, they are wired to a “Tumby Page” (here’s ours) which displays snapshots of the latest posts from the associated Tumblr and more.

The TumbyLands aggregate Tumblrs, their content and include various useful discoverability widgets. You can get a Tumby Page for any Tumblr on the planet — you just need its name. The TumbyLand lists can be public, private, or shared among users you authorize. Lists can have multiple collaborators too.

While the site’s currently in invitation mode, you can take a look and get your invite by visiting Tumby.me. If you’re interested in curating a TumbyLand, email info@tumby.me.

Tumby Search adds another level of discoverability by integrating full-text search capability to your Tumblr. Tumblr’s standard search bar searches through blog tags, not through blog content. And in Buckley’s view, tagging is a limited, manual and subjective process. Full-text search, he says, is the opposite and its indexing is automatic. This ensures that readers don’t miss posts you made about specific topics.

For example, we’ve integrated Tumby search on The FJP Tumblr. Here’s what a search for “newsroom disruption” looks like. The results, in our opinion, are richer than what would have been returned with Tumblr’s native search.

Buckley, a software veteran who’s been involved in the introduction of advanced technologies with companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM’s ILOG, and Kodak, recognized an opportunity to do what he’d always done, but this time with Tumblr. He’s been working and thinking about Tumby and Tumblr discoverability for about a year now, and is rolling out what he considers a “final beta” for public view.

Over on theFJP.org is a Q&A where Buckley explains what Tumby is, how it came about, and while not quite revealing the secret sauce about how it all works, he does explain what it’s like working with Tumblr as a platform and issues of discoverability in general. — Michael

Mothership Connection

Dylan Tweney, Executive Editor of Venture Beat, runs through recent kerfluffles on our social networks, from their ever changing terms and conditions, to restrictions on how you can access your information, to the whole wall garden-ness of them.

“It’s time,” he writes, “to take back our social networks.”

To do so he recommends going back to a platform many have left behind, the blog, and turning it into a mothership of sorts.

[It’s] a bit of a retro suggestion, because blogs have taken a back seat to other forms of expression in the past few years. The RSS feed never engendered the kind of reciprocal sharing and commenting that a well-designed social network does, and as a result, many people have migrated away from blogging.

“I’ve used many social networks. Friendster, Facebook, everything. But they come and go. But my blog has always been my home on the web,” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told me last week. ”What’s changed in the past few years is that blogging started to feel a bit more lonely, because it wasn’t connected to these social news feeds.”

Like Mullenweg, those of us who have had blogs for a decade or more have been using them less and less, drawn to the ease of tweeting and the warm, friendly responsiveness of Facebook.

But now it’s possible to circle back to the blog without giving up the social networks. In fact, it’s increasingly easy to use a blog as the center of your social universe.

That’s because, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter are reluctant to share data out, they are eager to bring your data in. (This is why Twitter no longer lets you update your LinkedIn status from Twitter, but you can do the reverse and update your Twitter status from LinkedIn.)

So if they won’t share, fine: Make your own website the source, and share it out to various other networks as a way of staying in touch with your friends there.

In other words, with a few simple hooks, your blog becomes the mothership of your online activity.

For example, Tweney points out that WordPress users can use a part of the Jetpack suite of plugins to push your content to networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and LinkedIn. IFTTT is another great resources for managing content flow online.

This is a good start to maintaining control of your content but here are three quick — and related — caveats to think about as you do so:

Social networks are social because of our interaction on them. They shouldn’t just be repositories of our publishing exhaust. You have to go to them, and interact on them within the cultural norms that have evolved on them. Or at least use tools that allow you to do so. One I’ve recently started playing with is Engagio. It basically presents your social interactions across platforms in a Gmail-like interface.
Yes, we’d like people to come see how shiny and bright our motherships are but that’s not really the point, is it? We’re trying to engage audiences wherever they may be which means it is not just about sending out a link and asking people to leave the space they’re currently in to learn what might be behind that link. Again, remember the social and think of a real life gathering. You wouldn’t approach people at a party and say, Hey, I have something I want to share with you but we have to leave here in order for me to give you the lowdown.
Sometimes — perhaps oftentimes — we need to customize and/or prepare our content for different platforms. Take photos, for example. Tumblr has a great way to present them, and allows you to order them in particular ways and with different layouts. Facebook handles photos different. Ditto Flickr and Google. By merely pushing content from the mothership to the social network without paying attention to the nuances of each platform we lose an opportunity to tune that content in the best way for the audiences that will view it on that platform.

Despite the caveats, knowing how to maintain control and “ownership” of your content is important. And it’s not just for us little people.

Last week the Guardian announced that it was killing its Facebook social reader in order to regain control over the user experience people have with its content.

Somewhat Related, Part 01: Anil Dash, The Web We Lost: A look back at how just a few years ago the Web was much more interoperable.

Somewhat Related, Part 02: Bernard Meisler, Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff On Facebook?: Exploring fake likes across Facebook and how/why they might be happening.

Spotify

Permalink
13

Should Facebook Buy Tumblr?

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram writes about the logic of Facebook acquiring Tumblr but leaving it as a standalone platform. The argument is that Tumblr poses the same threat to the social network that Instagram did.

Via GigaOm:

It might seem a little early to start talking about potential Facebook acquisitions considering the social network just completed its $736-million purchase of Instagram, and its share price is still 40 percent lower than it was when the company went public. But I think Facebook should start thinking hard (assuming it isn’t already) about trying to acquire Tumblr. Why? For some or all of the same reasons that it felt compelled to buy Instagram — including the fact that the massive growth and engagement Tumblr is seeing is a direct threat to Facebook’s future success. It seems obvious someone is going to take advantage of that, and if it isn’t Facebook then it will be a competitor…

…When you look at Tumblr’s size and growth, it’s easy to assume that you have somehow made a mistake and added too many zeroes: at the beginning of this year the network was at 15 billion pageviews, and a little more than a year ago it was at 10 billion. According to estimates from Quantcast, in the past year the site has almost doubled the number of monthly visitors it gets, from about 80 million to almost 140 million. There are more than 35 billion posts on the almost 80 million blogs that are hosted on the service, and it gets tens of millions of new posts every day from what Karp told me were its 160 million or so members.

FJP: From a business standpoint, Mathew’s argument makes sense… for Facebook. From a cultural standpoint, please, no.

Video: Mathew recently interviewed Tumblr founder David Karp for GigaOm’s 2012 Roadmap Conference in San Francisco. The conversation focuses on design strategy as it relates to digital identity. Run Time: 25:00. A TL;DR version of the conversation is here.

Permalink
77

storyboard:

Sandy on Tumblr: Beating the Hurricane Blues

The disaster wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast dwarfs anything most of us have ever experienced. But the response to that disaster from the community has humbled and gratified those of us who work at Tumblr. We want to recognize a few of the people and organizations doing amazing work related to Sandy, and we want to make it clear the credit for that work rests entirely with them. Obviously this is just a tiny fraction of the massively diverse and positive response; for more, be sure to check out the Hurricane Sandy tag.

Cool Tumblrs Doing Cool Things

• Dr. Dave Ores - A doctor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side providing free medical services to his stormstruck neighbors, among other humanitarian acts.
• The Moosehead - Photographer Nathan Hoang has some amazing pre-/during/post-Sandy shots.
• Is Twitter Wrong? - A mini-Snopes that’s done a lot of yeoman work disproving various fake “news” photos of menacing weather, storm damage, etc.
• Momofuku - The NYC restaurant powerhouse is hosting three events today in various locations to benefit the Red Cross.
• Pith - The prolific Jesse Chan-Norris has produced some of the most immediate and amazing storm photos to come out of New York, bar none. If you’ve been on Tumblr this week, it’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen his work.
• Change.org - Publicizing services and circulating a number of petitions and initiatives to benefit those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
• Humans of New York - Our pal Brandon Stanton is of course out on the streets photographing his fellow New Yorkers with the usual aplomb and care.
• Jen Bekman Projects - Donating proceeds from particular artworks to hurricane relief.
• Shapeways - The 3D printing company blogged their efforts of getting back together post-Sandy.
• Casey Neistat - Photog and avid biker, combining both passions for some unique photos & video of Sandy in New York.
• Scott’s Pizza Journal - Very Important: Where can you still get a slice in NYC?

Hurricane Sandy Tumblrs

• Working from Home During Sandy - The staff of Bonobos doing business outside the office.
• Hurricane Sandy Blog - A dedicated Tumblr from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
• Sandy Hates Books - Cleanup and fundraising for the Sandy-damaged powerHouse Arena bookstore and event space.
• Surviving Hurricane Sandy in Zone A - Two guys, their cameras, and a typical neverending quest for battery charging, food, and/or beer.
• Governor - Rebuilding a restaurant in New York’s DUMBO neighborhood savaged by Sandy.
• Lydia Callis’ Face for NYC Mayor - Devoted to the adoration of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s on-camera American Sign Language interpreter (see also).

Media Tumblrs

• WNYC’s Transmitter - Like the radio station, WNYC’s Tumblr has stayed up thanks to listener/reader support. They’ve turned in excellent coverage and service alerts before, during, and after the storm.
• The Atlantic - Tying in hurricane stories from the Atlantic’s main site, plus the Atlantic Wire and the Tumblr community generally.
• The Daily - News Corp’s iPad mag putting some of their best storm content on their Tumblr as well.
• Gawker - The flagship of Gawker Media (and its various siblings) moved backup sites to Tumblr after their datacenter was flooded, and their storm coverage and editorial style are a natural fit.
• BuzzFeed - Also temporarily housing their newsgathering on Tumblr post-flood, BF farmed out a wide range of coverage and collection via their subject-oriented Tumblrs as well as their staffers’ blogs — notably Scott Lamb, Ryan Broderick, and Andrew Kaczynski.
• Mother Jones - Mixing in activism and local storm response with national news and politics

— Photo by Noah Kalina

4,000 Posts and Growing

Permalink
15

6,778 words on Tumblr, to an anonymous fan who expressed interest in suicide

The story began last week, when Gethard received a question from a fan via the microblogging service Tumblr. As an author and a comedian—he is a member of the sterling comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade and has his own show on New York’s public access television—Gethard gets fan queries all the time. But this one was different.

“I know you’ve talked about bout depression and anxiety issues before,” wrote Anonymous, “and if you don’t answer this cause it’s a complete downer I understand but I’m curious if you ever had suicidal thoughts. I admire you and your show and have just been in a really bad place lately. I used to see your show as the last thing I had to look forward to but I haven’t even been back for months and can’t even bring myself out the door to get there without panicking. I’d appreciate any advice really.”

What to do with a plea like this? Anonymous, after all, could just as easily be a merry prankster as a real fan in distress. And moreover Tumblr, used mainly to share funny photos or quick quips, is hardly the platform for nuanced advice on mental health, nor are comedians the ones best suited to dispense such advice. Gethard could have ignored his digital Werther, or he could have adhered to the sensibilities of the Internet and posted a funny photo or a bit of pithy pep. He did neither.

“I want you to know I saw your message about thirty seconds ago and I’m already writing this,” Gethard wrote.

Keep Reading

FJP: Filed under: In which the internet can be a place for hope, action and inspiration.

Permalink
42

WNYC's Transmitter: PITCH: Is Tumblr the Next Time, Inc?

onaunconference:

Once upon a time, the jobs in journalism were all at what we would consider traditional outlets — Time, Newsweek, ABC News, the Washington Post, etc. But these days, journalists who’ve had their pick of those publications are flocking to tech companies like Tumblr,…

Posts tagged Tumblr

Sandy on Tumblr: Beating the Hurricane Blues

Cool Tumblrs Doing Cool Things

Hurricane Sandy Tumblrs

Media Tumblrs

6,778 words on Tumblr, to an anonymous fan who expressed interest in suicide

WNYC's Transmitter: PITCH: Is Tumblr the Next Time, Inc?