Giant blogging platform Tumblr has decided to adopt cartoonist Matthew "The Oatmeal" Inman's suggestion for a "fail whale" down-time graphic, the artist said in a Twitter message this afternoon. Inman posted the image of TumblBeasts taking over the servers this afternoon and said "please oh please use it" to Tumblr. Four hours later, Inman said he'd received an email from Tumblr's founder agreeing to use the image. You can see the end result below or live at this link.
Tumblr is a fast-growing publishing platform (last month we reported it has now raised more money and sees more hosted pageviews each month than WordPress) but it has struggled with occasional down-time, as such platforms often do. Its urban hipster image sometimes leads to mockery of its upset users when they complain of downtime, but we argued in support of those emotions in a December post titled Why a Day of Tumblr Downtime Matters to the Entire Web & World.
Dave Winer, a man who was key to the creation and growth of blogging, RSS, podcasting, OPML and several more technical standards that helped social media become what it is today, announced this morning that he's working on a new technology, a simple blogging tool that keeps an archival copy of your content on your servers, but pushes it out onto whatever other publishing platform you choose, whether that be Tumblr, Twitter or "whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after."
"The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure," Winer wrote in a blog post today. "You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place." This is very good news. It appears that the tool will live first at My.ReallySimple.org (password protected).
Tumblr, the hip blogging and curation platform based in New York City, announced today that it has raised a new round of venture capital. Not yet four years old, Tumblr hosts far fewer bloggers and website visitors than its rival WordPress, but serves up more than twice as many total pageviews.
Financial documents and the company's blog indicate that the round was for $30 million, from a very impressive list of investors: Spark Capital (backers of Twitter, Aviary, GDGT, Next New Networks, and others), Union Square Ventures (backers of Etsy, Boxee, Disqus, Foursquare, GetGlue, Meetup and more) and as new investors, ultra-heavyweights Sequoia Capital (investors in Google, Apple, YouTube, PayPal, Zappos, RackSpace, Yahoo and many more). Tumblr has always been hot, but when a startup gets Sequoia Capital money and connections, it has entered a new echelon in the venture-funded tech world.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest report today documenting how different generations use the Internet, and most of the findings won't come as a surprise. Across generations and almost across the board, we're spending more time engaged in online activities, as watching videos, listening to music, and reading the news, for example, become inceasingly popular. The one notable exception: a decline in blogging among teens, with only half as many blogging today as did in 2006.
It's been just two years now since WordPress, the popular blogging platform, released its first mobile app. Today the company is celebrating reaching the million mobile user mark by releasing another app - this time for Nokia smartphones.
It's amazing to think that, as WordPress mobile project developer Isaac Keyet writes, "each day thousands of posts are written and posted using nothing but a wee phone keyboard and a built-in camera." Move over, Gutenberg!
WordPress.com just announced the launch of FoodPress, the blog host's first foray into aggregating content written by its users. FoodPress wants to become the "go-to destination for the hottest dishes from WordPress.com bloggers" and in order to do so, the company has partnered with Federated Media and enlisted the help of Jane Maynard as the site's editor.
Google's AdSense for Feeds, the RSS publishing service formerly known as FeedBurner, got a long-overdue refresh today and now displays subscriber and reader interaction stats in real time. When will Google Analytics get real-time stats? That's the question many people are asking - but it's not entirely clear how useful that would be.
Feed subscriber numbers are generally good to know, and revenues from feeds are better than a poke in the eye. But ultimately pageviews are what matter most to publishers. People say that Feedburner has declined in importance because of the rise of Twitter, but no publishing middleware is as important as readers landing on your page itself. There is potential for these kinds of real-time analytics to be leveraged for automated optimization of editorial decision making, but that's a relatively nascent field.
Publishing service Twitterfeed announced this week that it has partnered with UK startup SkimLinks to offer publishers an option to automatically turn product links and references on blogs into affiliate sales links. Twitterfeed automates the publishing of blog feeds into Twitter and Facebook.
SkimLinks over-writes links to products with affiliate links to any of several thousand vendors, and typically takes 25% of the affiliate revenue resulting from purchases originating on a publisher's site. Publishers retain 75% of revenue in exchange for producing the content and providing distribution.
Posterous, the minimalist blogging platform, may have allowed users to post to their blogs via email, or even the specially-formatted Posterous for mobile devices, but now it's gone that one extra step. Posterous for the iPhone is here, allowing users to post, manage their settings, upload media and even geo-tag their updates.
If you're either a power WordPress user, a security-conscious blogger or simply a control freak, then the new SMS features offered by WordPress are going to be right up your alley.
From alerting you to changes on your blog to allowing you to remotely approve post comments, the feature will help WordPress administrators keep things on their blogs on a short leash.
