Tumblr is more than a blog platform, in many cases it’s a beautiful way to visually represent a persons feelings and messages. It’s for that reason that many company’s have launched visual representations of their products through Tumblr and now the New York Times has joined in with “The Lively Morgue.”
Following in the tradition of Tumblr’s top blogs The Lively Morgue takes a unique approach to New York Times content, focusing not on news of the day but the history of the NYT through beautifully shot historical pictures that have been kept in pristine condition inside the New York Times newsroom archive known as “the morgue.”
The New York Times has been publishing archival photographs every day, publishing 17 collections to date via the New York Times however this is the first time the company has created a website dedicated solely to those photos.
While the New York Times has published quite a few photos they note: read more
Uber-popular blogging platform Tumblr announced on Thursday that it would remove “self-harm” promoting websites by targeting pro-anorexia blogs and other self-harm accounts that have popped up on the popular blog system.
The company’s new policy will not allow any blogging sites to promote self injury which range from anorexia and bulimia blogs to cutting and other acts of self-harm.
In the company’s official Tumblr post they clearly state that the new policy ”is intended to reach only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification.” That means you can still joke about starving yourself but the moment you talk about ways to create that starvation you’ll be in trouble.
Furthering its reach Tumblr will begin shows PSAs whenever searchers on their platform look for self-harm terms such as ”thinspiration,” “proana,” and “purging.” Those PSAs will feature contact information for groups that can help people looking for assistance with their self-harm issues. read more
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.
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.
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.
Tumblr is more than a blog platform, in many cases it’s a beautiful way to visually represent a persons feelings and messages. It’s for that reason that many company’s have launched visual representations of their products through Tumblr and now the New York Times has joined in with “The Lively Morgue.”
