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.

"Evolution creates amazing and complex things from just three simple rules: selection, replication, and variation," Mendenhall writes. We owe the amazing diversity of biological life to the application of these simple rules to enormous and complex gene pools over hundreds of millions of years.

Meme Pool has slightly more humble ambitions at the still-formidable scale of the human-driven Web. The genomes of Tumblr memes are much simpler than those of plants and animals. Meme Pool treats Tumblr posts' tags as alleles, each describing the phenotype, which is the image itself. The fitness of a Tumblr meme is determined by how many likes and reblogs it gets.

The Meme Pool

Meme Pool's population contains 20 posts at a time. Mendenhall says that gives posts a lifespan about a week "before they die of old age." Every day, the two fittest memes get to mate and create a child post. Meme Pool takes a random combination of the parents' tags and searches Flickr for interesting photos that match. When there's no good match for both combinations, Meme Pool uses a strategy sort of like nature's solution:

"Sometimes there's no match for both tags (e.g. 'Economics' and 'Lawn Darts'). In that case, the algorithm looks for images with either tag. This is a little bit like dominant and recessive traits: sometimes one tag will determine the entire phenotype. If there's no image for either tag, the post dies out immediately."

Without spontaneous generation, major evolutionary leaps might never happen. Meme Pool's random mutation comes from its Tumblr followers. Liking and reblogging posts from Meme Pool increases their fitness, making them more likely to survive and reproduce. Meme Pool also randomly reblogs one post from a follower per day, introducing its genes to the population. Anyone can also submit their own images to the Meme Pool to shake things up.

Health & Fitness

Meme Pool only launched yesterday (with a nice painting of the young Charles Darwin), and it's still fleshing out its population. It has had six generational updates so far as it approaches 20 memes, and biology still features heavily. It also contains some other historical figures and a few weird outliers, just like any healthy population.

There's a strong relationship in the phenotypes of some members of the first generation. The fly species Drosophilia is thriving in Meme Pool, which isn't surprising, since its often used as a model for scientists studying genetics. With Darwin himself as an ancestor, you can see the family resemblance.

Follow Meme Pool on Tumblr to participate in the experiment and shape memes on the Web for generations to come.

Photo 1 from Flickr user Gustavo (lu7frb) via Meme Pool Photo 2 reblogged from touba by Meme Pool

Some Facebook users do leave the message option public on their personal profiles. It's more likely that if you're not Facebook friends with that person, you won't be able to privately message them.

If you're a fan of a blogger on Twitter, you can only send a private direct message if the blogger follows you back. Otherwise, a public @ message is your best bet. Still, Twitter users do not always feel obliged to return those @ messages.

Sending fan mail via Tumblr ensures that your favorite blogger sees your note.

You can customize each piece of fan mail, and there is no limit to how much fan mail you can send. Tumblr rolls out this feature over the next few days.

How do you send fan mail to your favorite bloggers? Tell us about it in the comments.

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!"

To learn more about SOPA, check out our infographic post about the effects of the bill. You can voice your opposition today at AmericanCensorship.org.

Thanks to Anthony De Rosa for pointing us to this poignant performance by one of the Web's most influential sites.

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.

The site publishes over 200 posts per week, an average of about 30 per day (higher on weekdays). There are currently four other contributors, other than Smith. The site can be consumed by following on Tumblr, or by RSS, Twitter and Facebook.

The audience reaction and feedback - mostly via Tumblr, but also other social media such as Twitter - is a key part of the site. Catching the eyes of readers with visual design and enticing them to engage with the content is what ShortFormBlog is all about. "I like to think of what we do as sort of a soft approach to more serious news," remarked Smith. "It's one that uses commentary as a tool, along with straight storytelling. A lot of what we do involves numbers, quotes, various types of blurbs, different sizes of photos and so on, anything to keep things interesting."

The Tumblr community is especially important. "One thing that's really helped us grow," remarked Smith, "is that there's a strong community around news on Tumblr. There are a number of great Tumblrs -- Pantsless Progressive, SoupSoup, BrooklynMutt, inothernews, kateoplis, The Political Notebook and NewsFlick, to name a few -- that really take the concept of news curation to heart."

How Tumblr is Being Used

ShortFormBlog uses a mix of Tumblr and Wordpress as its publishing platform. In particular, a plugin called Tumblrize. As Smith explained, Tumblrize "allowed me to take the WordPress backend (which I had invested a lot of work into customizing) and use it as a Tumblr backend."

So why still use Wordpress, if Tumblr appears to offer a great publishing platform for short-form content already? According to Ernie Smith, it's because the design tools they use are reliant on having a custom editing interface. "Through a bit of melding TinyMCE and some super-specialized CSS," he said, "we can pretty much do our number-based and burby posts without having to touch any HTML. I've also hacked the Tumblrize plugin to do a bunch of extra things -- effectively doubling Tumblr's seven base styles."

This is what their posting interface looks like:

The site currently gets between 40,000 and 50,000 unique visitors a month, although Smith said that "with over 12,000 [Tumblr] followers and Tumblr's viral nature, the true reach of our content is probably much further than that."

Is There a Future in Curated News?

ShortFormBlog is an excellent example of innovation in journalism. And it uses a consumer blogging service that wasn't designed to be a professional media tool.

Sure the bulk of its content is sourced from external media outlets, which is not dissimilar to the heavily criticized Huffington Post "aggregation" model. But let's look at the bigger picture: the media ecosystem nowadays relies as much on good curation than on original writing. The curation needs to done selectively though, with a solid filter, in order to attract a regular readership. That is the opportunity for sites like ShortFormBlog.

Let us know what you think of Ernie's site and approach in the comments.

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.

A better comparison these days is between Tumblr and Wordpress.com, the leading full blogging platform. While Wordpress.com still gets more visits (but not page views, as we'll see below), Tumblr is drawing ever closer.

Tumblr vs. Wordpress.com, in visits per month.

The two services offer different things, so this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison. Wordpress.com is a fully-fledged hosted blogging platform, while Tumblr is a light blogging and curation service. I myself use both products. However, both are blogging services and so it's worth comparing the statistics.

At the end of last year we estimated that Wordpress.com was larger than Tumblr in terms of unique visitors and number of bloggers. However we noted that Tumblr had about twice the number of page views per month.

On the page view front at least, Tumblr has exploded in recent months. Quantcast puts it at 12 billion per month currently, compared to 1.4B for Wordpress.com. So Tumblr now gets 8.5 times more page views per month than Wordpress.com (at least according to Quantcast, which in my experience tends to be the most accurate public web statistics tool).

Before we get too excited, we should remember that Facebook is still a blue whale compared to both Tumblr and Wordpress.com. Quantcast has Facebook at 7.4 billion visits per month in the U.S. alone.

What's the upshot of all this? Maybe just that Tumblr has scaled incredibly well and shows no signs of slowing down. Wordpress.com hasn't had the same exponential growth, but it's certainly been no slouch either. Both services are enormously popular and many people use them side by side.

Let us know your thoughts on Tumblr compared to Wordpress.com in the comments. Should Wordpress.com be worried?

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.

Earlier this year, Tumblr even surpassed Wordpress in terms of pageviews and money, although it still has fewer total bloggers and visitors.

The New York-based startup has raised $40 million in funding since being founded in 2007. The service is estimated to receive about 3 billion pageviews per month.

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.

Stipe noted that his Tumblr site represents the real him - it's not subject to peoples' pre-conceptions, nor is it a manufactured image. His Tumblr is called Confessions of a Michael Stipe, which according to its author is an inside joke. "This might not be the Michael Stipe that you think you know," said Stipe, "this is actually me."

Disclosure: Intel co-sponsors the Creators Project and is also sponsor of our ReadWriteHack channel.

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.

Showyou is rolling out an update today to address just that - and more. In addition to connecting Showyou to your Facebook, Twitter, and Vodpod accounts, you can add your YouTube, Vimeo, and Tumblr accounts. When you connect these services to Showyou, you'll be able to see the videos posted to the channels you subscribe to as well as by the people you follow.

Showyou is also expanding its "grid," upping the number of videos you'll be able to browse through on the app - up to 200 videos from friends and people you follow on social networks. The app now also includes the ability to try out the app without actually signing in via a new "Guest Access" button.

Recent statistics point to the fact that we're consuming more and more video via our mobile devices. That puts ShowYou in a good position to make not just the consumption, but the discovery of video a lot better.

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.

In the contest to determine what the best recommendation and discovery method of a content-stuffed web is, score one vote here for recent media by popular topic, followed by content curators with the most popular history of curation or content creation.

It appears there's no single human editor of Tumblr Explore, nor is there a way to surface the most popular content on a particular topic. It's all one big vote on topics and people and from that vote follows the most recent stream of what's new. It's very different from the way content is surfaced on sites like Reddit or Techmeme. Will it work well? Time will tell, but it's sure to be fun to wander through.

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.

You'll note that the monsters got a name change when they were let inside the house. Personally, I like Inman's TumblBeasts a little better.

Inman has propelled his web comic to fame less than two years since launching it. He was the subject of an interview on tech blog Mashable this morning, for example. Inman has grown famous on the web for web-centric humor satirizing things like email, but has built his business from sales of more utilitarian works of humor like How to Use a Semicolon. Next time Tumblr goes down, which Inman tongue-in-cheek Tweets he hopes happens soon, now you'll know where that image came from.

In the Summer of 2008, ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote about how a much less well-known designer named Yiying Lu posted a whale graphic to iStockPhoto and then saw a community of Twitter fans propel the image into official use as the page telling users when Twitter is down.

This year there was plenty of competition. Foursquare won the battle of the check-in apps, Flipboard created an innovative iPad app that caught our imagination, Instagram burst onto the scene with a mobile photo app. The LittleCo that impressed us the most though was New York-based Tumblr.

Tumblr launched back in 2007, but this year it really took off in terms of growth - crushing its nearest light blogging rival, Posterous. Tumblr achieved this growth at surprisingly low staffing levels: just 16 employees, with an estimated 20 before end of 2010. It's got plenty of money behind it, though. The company has raised $40m. $30m of that was raised this month from existing investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, plus new investors Sequoia Capital (who backed Google in 1999, before it went big).

Tumblr currently boasts over 11 million blogs running on its service, perhaps leading to some performance hiccups recently.

In a recent comparison we did between Tumblr and the popular blogging service Wordpress, we discovered that people who visit Tumblr blogs view far more pages per person and twice as many pages in total. WordPress still has many more publishers and far more site visitors, but Tumblr is doing better on a user engagement level.

Heading into 2011, Tumblr has a full tank of funding petrol and is racing full speed up the page view growth slope. Content curation is expected to be a big trend of 2011, so next year could be another tipping point again for this trendy New York startup.

What do you think of our choice for Best LittleCo of 2010? Do you agree with Tumblr, or should it have been another startup? As always, let us know in the comments.

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.

How big is Tumblr compared to WordPress? Automattic's Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, told TechCrunch last week that his network is "currently getting about 300 million unique visitors on WordPress.com a month." Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate that the whole Automattic network sees almost 500 million monthly visitors.

How many blog publishers does each network have? WordPress says it has 30 million, Tumblr said today it has 11 million.

But pageviews? Quantcast estimates that WordPress serves up 1.4 billion pageviews each month. Tumblr, it estimates, sees about 3 billion.

In other words, WordPress has many more publishers and far more site visitors, but people who visit Tumblr blogs view far more pages per person and twice as many pages in total.

At the same time, analytics provider Postrank concludes that WordPress and Blogger.com blogs get far more off-site social media engagement that Tumblr blogs do.

Pick your metric - what matters most? Probably pageviews.

Tumblr has now raised a total of $40 million, surpassing the $30 million WordPress parent company Automattic raised almost three years ago. Automattic is believed to bring in about $10 million per year in revenue, again according to TechCrunch last week. No revenue numbers have been estimated for Tumblr, but the company is presumably monetizing the growing number of blogs it's hosting for big media companies. That's similar to the business that Automattic is in, though much smaller.

Other competitors include SquareSpace, Acquia and SixApart. None are as easy to use as Tumblr is, however.

Disclosure: The author of this post loves WordPress and has never been able to get into Tumblr. Clearly a lot of other people have, though.

How would Kedrosky respond if this was 24 hours of Twitter down time, though? Would we even hear his cries for help? Maybe on Facebook, or more likely on one of his regular CNBC appearances. The point is, one person's silly diversion is another person's life-changing communication channel to the world. That's what Tumblr is to millions of people, and the fact that we suffer withdrawal when our publishing tool of choice goes down isn't just a symbol of our civilization's decline from meaning - it's an illustration of how much things have changed because of these new technologies that have democratized publishing.

Some people will turn their noses up at such psychological weakness, such dependency. But consider the other side of the coin.

Some times I walk down the street and I find myself thinking about something that I want to share with the world. When I'm feeling like that, I pull out my phone and launch my Cinch app. I speak into my phone and record a few minutes of thoughts out loud. Then I publish that recording online with a click. It goes out to my Twitter followers and to my friends on Facebook.

Democratic discourse, the marketplace of ideas, the rational processes through which we individually and collectively make decisions, the expansiveness of our own horizons - all of those things are made richer by the proliferation of lightweight publishing tools like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

A win for any of those platforms is a win for us all. And when one of them loses, we all lose.

And when I can't speak to my social contacts, when I can't express myself in ways I've grown accustomed to, when I can't learn what the thoughtful people in my life are saying and sharing, it honestly feels like I've lost the glasses on my face that I've grown accustomed to seeing the world better through.

This new web that people not only read but also write to offers a whole new world of self-expression, interpersonal communication and self-education. Would we miss it if it was gone? We would. Is that a legitimate feeling, more worthy of understanding and appreciation than of mockery? I think it is.

Investors have put tens of millions of dollars into wagers that these kinds of publishing tools will change the world. Those investors aren't fools.

What will the world look like in 10 or 20 years, when today's young people feel entitled to instant, global, reliable communication and self expression? I expect it will look very different.

Tumblr and similar services are sometimes termed light blogging, as they enable people to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr is the market leader amongst such tools, followed by Posterous, Soup.io, Noovo and others. Tumblr has grown the most in recent times, but Posterous has fought hard. Let's review the fast-moving and often entertaining moves in this market over 2010.

Tumblr has always been a step ahead, as it launched back in April 2007 whereas Posterous didn't launch until June 2008. In December last year, Tumblr announced a couple of innovations that kick-started 2010: real-time alerts and enabling Twitter clients to support Tumblr.

Posterous Gets Aggressive, Takes on Tumblr & Others

Tumblr may have gotten off to a better start in 2010, but Posterous soon upped the ante with new features.

In April, Posterous announced that it was shedding its minimalist origins and essentially began competing on feature set with Tumblr. When it launched, the only way to post a story to Posterous was by email. However in April 2010, Posterous added a full rich text editor and put more emphasis on sharing media files. It also hooked into Facebook's OpenGraph API and added 'like' buttons.

In June, Posterous embarked on an aggressive marketing push to get Tumblr's users to switch. It started promoting tools that enabled users to import their content from other products - including from Tumblr. The campaign infamously called out a number of blogging products as "dying platforms." It was a brazen move by Posterous and entertaining to watch, but ultimately it didn't succeed. In the final analysis, Tumblr grew the most in 2010.

The main factors in Tumblr's growth over 2010 have been its first mover advantage, celebrities and big media companies using Tumblr sites, and Tumblr's ability to socialize its service better than Posterous.

Traditional Media Companies Flock to Tumblr

A good example of big media flocking to these tools (but mostly Tumblr) in 2010 was National Public Radio (NPR). ReadWriteWeb's Chris Cameron spoke to NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin in September to find out how the organization was leveraging Tumblr.

"Part of what we do is experiment on different platforms, and it seemed apparent to us that there was a sizable number of NPR fans on Tumblr," Carvin told us. "It's less about page views and more about engaging a community that enjoys NPR."

Carvin explained that NPR is taking a very experimental approach to Tumblr in terms of curating content to share, engaging one-on-one with followers and determining how to voice the blog.

A number of traditional media outlets began to use Tumblr this year, including Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone.

Finally, we should also mention that many full blogging platforms added Tumblr and Posterous-like functionality in 2010. For example, in September leading blog platform Wordpress.com added subscriptions - reminding our writer Mike Melanson of Tumblr's "Follow" feature.

Poll: Which Light Blogging Tool Do You Use?

Overall, it was a great year for Tumblr in terms of its user growth and uptake from traditional media companies. We commend Posterous too for its excellent features and brave marketing moves (many of the ReadWriteWeb team use Posterous - although personally I use one of the underdogs, Soup.io).

2010 was a year in which light blogging tools showed their worth as easy, fun ways for people to share content and connect with others.

We ran this poll in September 2009, but it's time for an update. Let us know which light blogging tool you use and, if you like, leave a comment explaining why.

It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

The blog TorrentFreak has a "behind the scenes look at Anonymous' Operation Payback," examining some of the history and motivations behind the recent series of direct actions that Anonymous has coordinated against pro-copyright groups. And as the TorrentFreak story makes clear, the anarchic nature of the group makes it difficult to generalize too much about who they are or what they want.

"We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn't have a broad shared set of ideals," writes TorrentFreak's Ernesto. "Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups." According to interviews with TorrentFreak, some of Anonymous' members are also frustrated that their actions have not driven media attention to their demands. These have been posted online for over a week and include short, medium and long range goals for revising copyright law.

Rethink Copyright Law... Or Else

While the demands call for an immediate end to piracy lawsuits, Anonymous's call to wean the world away from its current copyright laws seems more measured. In fact, the group does not demand an end to copyright altogether. Within the next 2 or 3 years, Anonymous says copyright lifetime should be reduced to around 25 years. Within the next 10 years, it should be reduced to about 5 years. And in the long term, it should be reduced to between 0 and 1 year.

The list of demands makes no mention of file-sharing, even though many of the group's targets have been those associated with the criminalization - or at least demonization - of file-sharing, groups like the RIAA and the MPAA.

"What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to 'fair' lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable," a spokesman for Anonymous told TorrentFreak.

Shutting Down Websites, Opening Up Dialogue

It's debatable whether or not DDoS attacks get you heard, let alone accepted. And while the FBI investigations into Anonymous's DDoS attacks may have put a damper on the group's actions, it may be that other forces - those very anarchic forces that gave the group its origins - also serve to undermine and fragment the message that Anonymous is trying to communicate about the problems with contemporary copyright law. And although spats with Gene Simmons make for great headlines, the DDoS attacks so far haven't really made for great political dialogue or legal change.