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The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

Mr. E.C. Mendenhall has built a robo-Tumblr called Meme Pool to experiment with the evolution of ideas. Just as a gene pool is the collection of all biological expressions (genes) in a population, a meme pool is the pool of memes, or transmittable ideas. Mendenhall's Meme Pool draws on Tumblr's vast reservoir of image memes, picks the two fittest every day, mates them and posts their offspring.

There's no relation to memepool, the once-great mini-blog of handpicked Internet goodies. That one hasn't evolved since 2008. But armed with a little bit of Python and the surging population of Tumblr, Mendenhall will try to give the primordial ooze of the Web a new life of its own.

Tumblr just announced a new private messaging feature called Fan Mail. It's a more personal means that's not email, which requires you to know your favorite blogger's email address (do you?) or the handwritten form of the 20th century, snail mail. That leaves two social network-y means of contact: Facebook private messages and Twitter direct messages. Depending on the blogger's comfort level, however, they may not make Facebook messages on profile pages an option. Similarly, not every blogger follows fans back on Twitter.

The Internet is rising up to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is just a noble name wrapped around a dangerous package. It's an overreaching bill being pushed in the name of Homeland Security, even going so far as to target Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with past requests.

Today is American Censorship Day, and it happens to coincide with a hearing in the U.S. House about this censorship bill. To raise awareness of the importance of stopping SOPA, Tumblr has artfully censored everyone's blog dashboards and linked to a petition form at the top of the page under the heading, "Stop The Law That Will Censor The Internet!"

Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool - it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does.

Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post. He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. And I think he's onto something, certainly in terms of using a tool like Tumblr to change the way news is delivered and consumed. I interviewed Smith to find out more about his Tumblr-powered news service.

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.

Microblogging and curation platform Tumblr reached its 10 billionth post today, marking another milestone for the hip and ever-growing service.

The service currently hosts over 28 million blogs, which are used to publish tens of millions of posts each day. The site's total posts hit 10 billion earlier today, according to the company's "about" page.

Michael Stipe is the lead singer of R.E.M., one of the most influential bands of all time. In an interview with Creators Project, Stipe describes how he uses the blogging platform Tumblr to publish his side project art work. "In a way, like the rest of the world, I'm kind of self-publishing on my Tumblr site," said Stipe in the interview.

It's refreshing to know that someone as famous as Michael Stipe is admitting that he's just like every other Tumblr user. It shows both how truly democratic these Web tools are and the level of control that anybody - Michael Stipe or not - can have over their creative work.

As a tech journalist who travels a lot, I often find myself sitting next to someone at the airport or on an airplane who wants my advice on whether they should buy an iPad or which apps they should download. (Note to self: start carrying print books again in lieu of gadgets to avoid these sorts of conversations.) Lately, when it comes to showcasing the iPad's wow-factor, I've shown people Showyou.

The video-browsing app launched last month to great praise, much of it comparing Showyou's reinvention of consuming videos on the iPad to Flipboard's reinvention of consuming blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds. The enthusiasm for the app doesn't just come from the tech press. Since its launch, Showyou says it's already fetched over 10 million videos from its users' Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the startup says that users watch, on average, more than 4 videos every time they open the app.

Tumblr, one of if not the largest blogging and curation platform on the web, today launched a new way to explore content by topic and discover the most popular Tumblr users on the hot topics of the day. Called Tumblr Explore, the feature is intended to make the huge quantity of content on the site easier to navigate and new content easier to discover. The company also framed the feature in its announcement as a way for users to get more readers on their own blogs.

Who's the hottest Tumblr on the topic of food right now, for example? That would be Rachel Lauren Spence, author of SheSalty. Egypt and Libya are newly hot topics and the most popular curator across the Tumblr network on both those topics is Joshua Nguyen, who just happens to work for Tumblr. Six of the twenty six hottest blogs on the hottest topics listed on Tumblr Explore right now are written by Tumblr staff members.