Tumblr
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website owned by Tumblr, Inc. Tumblr users are allowed to post and share various content on their short-form blog, follow other users' blogs, and create private blogs. The site runs using a dashboard interface such that users can access the majority of Tumblr's features and other blogs from one location.[1]
Tumblr was founded in February of 2007 and is stationed in New York City. As of October 3, 2012, Tumblr has since grown to host 75.9 million blogs and is globally rated at rank 37, and rank 20 in the United states, in terms of user traffic.[2][3][4]
Contents
History
At 19, David Karp[18], the founder and CEO of Tumblr, caught on to a new trend in short-form blog posts, or "tumblelogs." After seeing no platform devoted to such blogs, Karp started working on one himself. Karp had begun programming at 11 after reading "HTML for Dummies" and at 15, dropped out of high school to pursue running his first company, Davidville, which would later change names to Tumblr, Inc.[5][6]
After beginning work on Tumblr in late 2006, in November of 2007, Tumblr was officially launched with an employee base of just David Karp and one other programmer, Marco Arment.
Two weeks after Tumblr's launch, it had a user base of 75,000. In 2009, Tumblr, Inc. acquired Tumblerette, an application in the Apple Inc App Store, after which Tumblr launched its official app for the iPhone. In 2012, Tumblr began moving towards paid advertising and featured their first brand advertising campaign with Adidas.[7]
As of October 6, 2012, Tumblr has over 76.3 million blogs and more than 33 billion blog posts.[8] The company has grown to 103 employees up from its original two, though Marco Arment had previously left in 2010 to focus on Instapaper. In early 2012, Tumblr had sported a growth of 15 billion monthly pageviews and 120 million monthly unique visitors, a 900% platform growth since the year before. 40 to 45% of Tumblr's current users are located in the U.S and 2% of its overall users are responsible for 43% of its visits. Tumblr is currently available in eight different languages.[9]
Features
Post Formats
Because Tumblr is a microblogging site, it offers a variety of templates for different mediums of posting that embody the core of its dashboard. The templates it offers assist in blogging text, photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts, audio, and videos. These templates have some flexibility in that you can include an image onto a text template and plain text on most of the other templates. On posting something to a blog, Tumblr also gives an option to tag that post to various topics or categories so that other users who search for those tags may find it.[10]
Blog Options
Tumblr gives various options in setting up one's blog. One can allow for multiple authors as well as write multiple unique blogs on a single account. A blog can be password protected so as to keep it private or share with a select group of readers. There are also several ways to customize a blog through selecting between various Tumblr provided themes. Furthermore, one can customize the HTML of a theme or make one from scratch. It is also possible to make one's created theme available to other users, either for free or to buy.[11]
User Interaction
There are several "tumblelogs" hosted on Tumblr and the service provides various ways for users to interact with each other. Tumblr allows you to "follow" other users' blogs such that new posts of theirs appear on the home dashboard much like a news feed. One can use the search function to search for posts relating to specified content. There is a "heart" option that allows users to keep a collection of blog posts they liked. Also, users can reblog posts, or copy and repost that content onto their own blog should they like enough to share to their own followers.[12]
Community
Compared to other social sites such as Twitter[19], Tumblr posts often lean towards images, Internet Memes[20], and GIFs[21]. Furthermore, Tumblr is unique in that it largely emphasizes a user's personality versus their identity, whereas other social networking sites often highlight celebrity pages or one's friend network. In this way, Tumblr's community lends itself to actively connecting to other users through finding shared interests and ideas without having to find content based off a user's identity. This aspect of Tumblr also allows Tumblr to be a notable provider for viral growth. GIFs in particular are rated as the number one tag in Tumblr posts. It is a common practice for both users and non-users to search Tumblr for GIFs depicting a certain concept and then link to those GIF posts across other social networking platforms and other sites on the internet.
Ethical Debates
Copyright Issues
Tumblr's feature of reblogging allows users to copy the posts of other users without giving them credit. This combined with the viral tendencies of Tumblr, creates a rapid spread of information. This can cause problems when the information spreading is not one authorized to be shared. Tumblr has a written policy "to respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement"[13] and Tumblr users must certify that they have a right to post the content they display on their blogs. Even so, given the nature of photo sharing platforms, often times these infringements are overlooked.
Perfect 10
Perfect 10, a San Diego-based publisher of pornography, filed a suit on May 4, 2012 against Tumblr as a result of Tumblr's failed action in taking down over 200 copyright infringing images. Many of the infringing images, Perfect 10 claimed, had Perfect 10 copyrights "conspicuously placed on the images." For cases involving information sharing platforms, under "safe harbor" laws, it is the user who is usually accountable for copyright infringements, not the host site. However, given that Perfect 10 had issued six takedown requests to Tumblr, which were largely ignored, the blame would then fall on Tumblr. [14][15]
Censoring
In February of 2012, Tumblr enacted a new policy of banning content that "actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm" after a trend in social networking to limit harmful content relating to children. Not included in this policy are posts with a joking intent such as the need to starve oneself after Thanksgiving. Besides censoring, Tumblr also has chosen to incorporate a public service announcement when performing some search queries, such as "purging", "anorexic", and "proana", that points out the topic's harmful effects and various resources available to find help. [16][17]
See Also
- ↑ Wikipedia "Tumblr" [1]
- ↑ Tumblr "About" [2]
- ↑ Alexa Top 500 Global Sites [3]
- ↑ Alexa Top Sites in United States [4]
- ↑ The History of Tumblr's Creation [5]
- ↑ Davidville [6]
- ↑ Wikipedia "Tumblr" [7]
- ↑ Tumblr "About" [8]
- ↑ The Big Picture "Tumblr Growth Statistics & Trends: Users & Usage" [9]
- ↑ A Complete Guide To Tumblr [10]
- ↑ A Complete Guide To Tumblr [11]
- ↑ A Complete Guide To Tumblr [12]
- ↑ Copyright Claim Against Tumblr May Test Immunity of Photo Sharing Sites [13]
- ↑ Copyright Claim Against Tumblr May Test Immunity of Photo Sharing Sites [14]
- ↑ Perfect 10 Sues Tumblr For Copyright Infringement Over Nude Photos [15]
- ↑ Tumblr Censors Self-Harm Blogs and Educates Users Who Search for “Thinspiration” [16]
- ↑ Is Tumblr’s New Policy Ethical? [17]
