Great Entrepreneurs Will Listen To You But Will Follow Their Own Instincts. I told this story in the comments to saturday's video post, but since not everyone reads the comments and I want this to make it into MBA Mondays, I figured I would turn it into a case study. In the early days of Tumblr, I used to bug David Karp, the founder and CEO of the Company, about comments. Though I had hacked my tumblog with Disqus, I wanted to be able to comment on other tumblogs and the vast majority of them had no comments because Tumblr did not support them natively. I was fairly persistent in my argument. But David held firm. He wanted Tumblr to be a positive place on the Internet. Eventually, I gave up and moved on to pestering some other entrepreneur about something I thought they should do with their product. In hindsight, I think David was right and I was wrong.
This is tricky territory for VCs and entrepreneurs. Tumblr Brings Improved Content Creation and Sharing to Mobile Apps. 6 September '12, 06:50am Follow Tumblr has updated its iOS and Android apps to bring a raft of new features which makes content creation and sharing easier, while the discovery process has also been aided to allow tag following and make blogs from friends easier to find. Mobile users can now share and reblog posts that they read on their device faster, using an improved ‘Reblog’ button and ‘advanced sharing’ options, which distributes content to Twitter, email or opens in a browser. Tags can now be tracked for discovery, for example allowing you to keep up with all ‘iPhone’ tagged Tumblr blogs. Blogs from Facebook and on-device contacts can also be found through the app, which has added new shortcuts and boasts revamped alerts that ping when a user has new likes, reblogs or follows.
The light blogging service reached 200 billion posts and 50 million blogs in March and the new app updates continue its focus on encouraging content and activity on mobile. ➤ App Store | Google Play. Is Tumblr Quietly Cracking Down On NSFW Porn? Two Deleted Sites Say Yes. At 69.4 million blogs and nearly 30 billion posts to date, the rush of growth at blogging site Tumblr has for years had a seedy undercurrent: the popular site is home to a long tail of raunchy, NSFW adult content. But now, a few signs are pointing to the company cracking down on it, with the sudden deletion of several popular porn blogs within a short space of time. Update: Tumbler says that the removal of some blogs on the site is not a change in its policy on adult content. Rather, it may have been the fault of “an overzealous heuristic”. The full statement: “There have been no recent changes to our content policies. However, we have looked into the accounts in question and discovered that they belong to small handful of blogs that had been recently flagged as ‘spam’ by an overzealous heuristic.
We are currently reviewing and will be reactivating any of these accounts that were improperly flagged.” [Original post follows] Three of the blogs in question were “Art Or Porn? Then… (via) Now… Tumblr Releases Revamped iOS App Version 3.0.0. Tumblr has introduced version 3.0.0 of its iOS app which features a raft of changes included a revamped dashboard, support for high-resolution images and Spotify, a new image viewer and offline support. Speaking last week, CEO David Karp said it would launch the new app, and the company describes the new release as a “completely rebuilt app that’s better in every possible way.” A significant number of changes have been made as it aims at making blogging from an iPhone easier — and more appealing — than ever before. Version 3.0.0 has increased the tap-based functionality within the app and, for example, swiping up on the ‘compose’ button brings up the camera while swiping left brings up the text post shortcut.
Significant changes have been made to images within the app. As a regular Tumblr user, I can say that support for offline is arguably one of the most significant introductions. . ➤ App Store. Tumblr Will Start Selling Ad Units On May 2. David Karp: Tumblr’s Revenue Model Is All About Telling Stories. In a fireside chat with MG Siegler at TechCrunch Disrupt Monday, Tumblr founder David Karp described how his company thinks differently about advertising than Facebook or Google, and how they hope to make it less distracting and more meaningful to users. In short, it’s all about telling stories. Karp said that for Tumblr, the stuff that appears in the main feed is pretty sacred, as it’s all content that users have chosen to subscribe to.
Instead of inserting branded content into the stream in the same way that companies like Twitter are beginning to do, Tumblr has instead reserved the right-side column for content that users may not have seen. But the differences go deeper than that — Karp wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks or with search ads.
“We want to make some real estate available not just to big brands, but to carve it out for people that are already a part of the network,” Karp said. Will Tumblr's New Terms Of Service Finally Lead To The De-Stupidifying Of Terms Of Service? Late last week there was some buzzing over Tumblr's new Terms of Service, which some noted had some amusingly plain language explanations in them, resulting in a bit of news coverage.
Having gone through the process of creating terms of service with lawyers before, I'm somewhat jaded on the subject -- even though I thought we had pretty good lawyers who worked with us. The problem, however, is that terms of service, like contracts, are often defined by very specific things that have gone wrong in the past, and the lawyers make their money in trying to keep such things from going wrong in the future. Their job isn't to make your terms fun and friendly, but rather to protect you from getting into legal trouble. We had even suggested doing a "human readable" terms of service to go with the legalese and were warned not to do so -- as it could create problems later on if the human readable section and the legal section were somehow determined to disagree.
Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. Tumblr On Its Self-Harm Blog Ban: Support Is OK, Glorification Is Not. Tumblr is clarifying its sticky position regarding the new policy to ban certain blogs from its network. You may remember last week, when the company took the bold stance that blogs promoting self-harm, including anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation and suicide, would no longer be allowed on its network. Today, the company is following up on the policy change to explain that it’s not banning blogs that are engaged in “discussion, support, encouragement, and documenting the experiences of those dealing with difficult conditions,” only those that are meant to trigger self-harm. But how will Tumblr know which is which? Tumblr’s response: the policy is being applied on a blog-by-blog basis.
In other words, there’s a manual review process. There won’t be any wholesale suspension based on tags or text. To that end, the company has updated the wording of the new policy, to better reflect its intentions. Apparently, Tumblr had written its own PSA previously. The old version (Tumblr’s suggestion): A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs | Tumblr Staff. Follow-up: Tumblr’s New Policy Against Pro-Self-Harm Blogs | Tumblr Staff. Tumblr Hires Writers to Cover Itself. All Quiet On The Tumblr Front, But Not The Back End: Here's What David Karp Has Brewing. Interview: David Karp, founder of Tumblr, on realising his dream | Media. David Karp, the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr, was 17 when he decided to cut the apron strings and move to Tokyo. With a smattering of Japanese and a sharp eye for computer code, the impatient Manhattan teenager embarked on a period of self-discovery.
"I was holed up in the middle of this world where it was just me on the internet," Karp recalls. Within weeks, he had fine-tuned his computer skills and cooled on the idea of building robots. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. But there was one small problem: his voice. "I was so silly – I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn't have to meet them and give away how young I was," he says. "I lied about my age. Karp returned to the US with a fistful of contracts (drawn up by his father) and a list of executives' ears to bend. Now 25, Karp is at the helm of one of the internet's fastest growing startups. It was time for Karp and Tumblr to grow up. But Karp is unconvinced. How Tumblr is Changing Journalism. 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. The concept behind ShortFormBlog is very simple: to publish really short posts throughout the day. The site publishes over 200 posts per week, an average of about 30 per day (higher on weekdays). The audience reaction and feedback - mostly via Tumblr, but also other social media such as Twitter - is a key part of the site. The Tumblr community is especially important. How Tumblr is Being Used ShortFormBlog uses a mix of Tumblr and Wordpress as its publishing platform. This is what their posting interface looks like: Lady Gaga Joins Tumblr. Lady Gaga must spend half of her time in front of the computer.
Already a big presence on Facebook and Twitter (not to mention GagaVille), Mother Monster has joined the Tumbeasts. The New York Times reports that Gaga's Tumblr — titled Amen † Fashion — launched Monday night, and posts are already receiving "Likes" into the several thousands. The blog mostly features snapshots of clothing and quotes from Gaga herself. Sample: "He ate my heart, so I put his in the 'Alejandro' video. " Tumblr is becoming a place for musicians to promote their music and interact with fans. Tumblr has been making it easier for artists to share new music. Musicians: Will you follow Gaga's lead?
Tumblr's growth. Tumblr funding. Tumblr Unveils Leader Board & Topic Navigation. 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. 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.