Tumblr has actively been attempting to showcase the networks talents lately, ast week the company hired two veteran journalists to cover the sites best content and now they have hired several emerging fashion bloggers to kick off New York Fashion Week.

Tumblr on Wednesday announced on its staff blog that they have partnered with Milk Studios, a photography and studio conglomerate who will take a team of five “local emerging voices in fashion from Tumblr to cover the events” to cover the events.

Readers of the massive blog network can find information using the NYFW tag or they can follow these five bloggers: Alex, Bryant, Chloe, Lucie and Miguel

News of this type of “intimate” interaction was a smart move for Tumblr after BetaBeat in September broke news of the company’s attempt to monetize New York Fashion Week by selling premium ads to willing brands. BetaBeat wrote at the time: read more

Tumblr has been busy lately, yesterday they announced the hiring of two veteran journalists to help cover their growing network of more than 44 million blogs and today they rolled out a new way to show off your work with “highlighted posts.”

Here’s what Tumblr has to say about the new program:

Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.

Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice! read more

Social blog service Tumblr has hired two journalists to help cover the networks extensive community.

Well known writers Chris Mohney, SVP of content for BlackBook Media and Jessice Bennett, senior writer and editor for Newsweek and The Daily Beast have been hired to cover various areas of content and conversation for the network which includes nearly 44 million blogs.

The task of covering Tumblr won’t be easy, as Bennett told Time:

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million, I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

The main idea will be to showcase bloggers use Tumblr to better showcase their work in creative, fun and unique ways. The writers will post their stories on the Tumblr staff blog while a new Tumblr site will likely be created to showcase their efforts.

read more

Currently, there at least some 22 countries that block some websites, even more that block VOIP services. China alone represents a block that can restrict access to your site to over 1 billion people.

Though there are ways around most of these Internet blocks, few within the countries impacted have the means and ability to do so, making those blocks, for the most part, at least somewhat effective at limiting communication.

The sad truth is that, though some strides have been made in promoting freedom of access online, many countries are tightening their grip. Recent news from Iran indicates the country tightening its grip and increasing its filtering. Turkey has also seen a similar tightening of Internet restrictions.

But blocking goes well beyond countries. Though less nefarious in nature, many companies and households also use blocking technology to restrict who can access certain sites. Whether the goal is to increase employee productivity or prevent minors from access adult content, the results are often the same.

So is your site being blocked? Are people who might want to visit your site barred from accessing it and, if so, what can be done about it? Here’s a quick look at the current web filtering landscape and what it means for your site. read more

Blogging service Tumblr on Tuesday announced a new record number of unique visitors for a single month. According to site officials Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month of July.

If those numbers are correct that would mean a 218% increase in site visitors based on the same period one year earlier.

Analytic information firm comScore also shows that Tumblr has seen their most massive increase since inception from April to July where visitor counts increased by more than 5 million monthly uniques. read more

Tumblr wants bloggers to tag their posts, while giving users the ability to find those tags in an easy to navigate setup, that’s why today they announced their new Explore Page.

The page uses a writers tags to show posts in a more “democratic” method, literally any tag can appear on the company’s explore page, bringing more readers to a bloggers Tumblr pages. The tags are met with images for those tags which provides a nice Web 2.0 appearance.

Tumblr visitors will also see the “Tumblr Wire” at the top of the page which shows the top tagged topics.

For users looking for constant information on a certain Tag they can also setup alerts via their Dashboard which means a YouTube news blogger would do well to always use the YouTube tag in their posts to reach their core audience.

The tagged feature only helps users already inside the Tumblr community of course Tags help with SEO so if you aren’t using them already you should be.

Now if we could just get Tumblr to add top posts to their front page, rather than providing a simple “Sign Up” option perhaps the site could bring in more traffic for people looking for top curated posts from the popular blogging platform. read more

After suffering massive downtime in December due to their immense growth, the engineers at Tumblr have posted explanation in order to help fend off critics regarding the platform’s stability.

As we break through our past bottlenecks, we are simultaneously faced with growth like we’ve never seen before. Our challenge is not only to support the current audience of 55 million, but to getahead of more than 250,000,000 new pageviews each week. [...]

This morning we suffered an outage for nearly an hour starting at about 7am EST. The proxy server that handles the vast majority of incoming requests failed, and its automatic backup also failed because of an unrelated networking issue. It took us longer than hoped to correct the multiple causes, but we’ve put systems into place to make sure that even another double failure won’t cause an outage like this in the future. (Tumblr Staff Blog)

Note: Emphasis theirs.

Tumblr has faced some sharp criticism within the blogosphere, especially after one of the founders sent a cold reply to a tech blogger who was outraged regarding the services less than stellar uptime record.

While Tumblr’s growth has been nothing short of impressive, hopefully the company can find a way to stabilize their servers, as they are one of the few blogging platforms that seems to be gaining popularity amongst the youth.

The Tumblr team has recently revamped the mobile layout for their micro blogging social network which should please users boasting one of two smartphones.

The new layout makes it easier for users viewing their Tumblr blog upon an iOS or Android device to not only create content, but also easily alter settings within their dashboards.

While Tumblr is also planning on making their blogs viewable for Blackberry fans, the company doesn’t seem to have an immediate interest in making their sites mobile friendly for users carrying Windows Phone 7, Nokia or even webOS devices.

The lack of interest beyond Blackberry, iOS and Android could also signal that the startup has no immediate plans to introduce native apps upon other smartphones, leaving the task to third party developers to fill in the gap (often at a premium).

Although its understandable why Tumblr isn’t committing to other platforms (as they are busy trying to keep their servers up in response to their tremendous growth), hopefully the company will in the future consider taking an agnostic approach to smartphones, something their rival WordPress has done.

Although Tumblr does have official apps upon Blackberry, iPhone and Android, they have yet to release an official app for Windows Phone 7.

Unfortunately it looks like a third party developer (by the name of “sefirot”) has decided to cash in on Tumblr’s lack of official presence by naming their app after the micro blogging site.

Although technically the app is called “Tumblr.” (with a period at the end), it’s doubtful that Tumblr’s lawyers are going to let the app pass unchallenged lest users confuse it for the official app (which can easily damage Tumblr’s brand).

While Tumblr doesn’t seem to mind third party developers utilizing their name within an app (which Ad Astra Consulting did with WPTumblr), it is doubtful that they will be thrilled with the idea of someone using their corporate name which is trademarked.

Ironically something similar happened to Twitter last year (although the company quickly changed the name to TwitterKiss later on) and I would not be surprised if Tumblr’s lawyers contact Microsoft in order to have the app removed or renamed before the year is out.

Despite receiving a large amount of investment funds, media attention and massive traffic (which resulted in a major outage earlier), Tumblr has for the most part focused on growth rather than formulating a business plan.

However after a Tumblr employee revealed the companies plans on helping users find relevant sites, some are wondering whether the company will consider advertising via promoted blogs (sort of like Twitter’s promoted tweets) in order to help bring in more revenue for the micro blogging platform.

This is pretty cool in and of itself, but something tells us this might be the start of a new advertising play from Tumblr. After all, the Tumblr blogs that are highlighted in these channels are going to get a slew of new followers. And the companies that are increasingly starting Tumblr blogs to market themselves want to get more followers for their Tumblr blogs. So it would make sense for Tumblr to sell some spots in these channels (with all disclosures, of course). (Business Insider)

Even though this idea would help the micro blogging site bring in some revenue (among other ideas), truth be told Tumblr has for the most part avoided advertising of any kind (although users can insert their own ads upon their sites for free).

Currently Tumblr makes most of its revenue through selling premium themes as well as for listings within its blog directory, although the latter users can obtain for free if their sites become popular enough.

While the idea of promoted blogs probably makes sense on paper, it’s still unclear how users would react to marketers attempting to “invade their space” (which could result in a backlash from users).

Either way hopefully the company can find a way to generate some revenue in the not-to-distant future, especially since Tumblr may be one of the few platforms that can actually combat the decline of blogging as a whole.