A shot of JD

Dec 8

Noticing lots of Tumblr dashboard spam recently.

Feb 9

Does Tumblr’s “photo reply” feature show it’s taking DailyBooth seriously as a competitor?

In the “lightweight blogging platforms for ver kids” market…

Dec 14

The most popular Tumblr blogs

I was thinking about this earlier. No-one pointed me to a list, and I couldn’t find an existing one, so I figured out a very vague, possibly totally inaccurate one out using Compete. I basically listed the subdomains that receive most visitors, which may mean that sites with custom domains have been omitted (not sure how that works technically but I can think of some key Tumblr blogs missing here, possibly for that reason). I manually deleted subdomains that are to do with the inner workings of Tumblr (except one, detailed below), such as media.tumblr.com, static.tumblr.com and data.tumblr.com.

I’ve listed only the first 25 here, but here’s the raw data to figure out the rest of the list for yourself.

Tumblr blog (Unique visitors/month)

staff.tumblr.com (26,420)
stfumarrieds.tumblr.com (24,590)
stfuparents.tumblr.com (21,623)
juliasegal.tumblr.com (16,083)
rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com (15,542)
thingsthatexciteme.tumblr.com (10,187)
surveyspot.tumblr.com (9,956)
papertissue.tumblr.com (9,914)
whatiwore.tumblr.com (9,907)
kari-shma.tumblr.com (8,776)
rafer.tumblr.com (8,550)
suicideblonde.tumblr.com (8,515)
evernote.tumblr.com (8,231)
bohemea.tumblr.com (8,094)
agentmlovestacos.tumblr.com (7,827)
sweethomestyle.tumblr.com (7,679)
azizisbored.tumblr.com (7,629)
fellatiofaces.tumblr.com (7,137) NSFW
slutsoft.tumblr.com (6,487) NSFW
demo.tumblr.com (6,440)
stuffhipstershate.tumblr.com (6,372)
soupsoup.tumblr.com (6,241)
icanread.tumblr.com (6,177)
adobegripes.tumblr.com (5,875)
lunchbagart.tumblr.com (5,842)

I won’t do any detailed analysis, but it’s interesting to note that a good proportion of the list are single-topic “gimme a book deal” blogs like Rules For My Unborn Son and Stuff Hipsters Hate. (I say that with a tongue half in my cheek, of course).

And it’s depressing that the standard content used for when you preview a Tumblr template receives more views than anything I’ve ever written ;-)

EDITS/ADDITIONS
And seemingly only two of this list are “adult”. Although this means nothing statistically about the prevalence (or otherwise) of porn on Tumblr.

I also meant to mention that Tumblr already provides a very good directory of sites organised by various categories and ranked by its own “Tumblarity” rating. But there’s no way to see overall popularity ignoring subcategories, and Tumblarity is a somewhat opaque/confusing metric.

I recognise too that a lot of views of Tumblr content take place via the dashboard, which further skews these results. See the Disqus comments on this post.

Dec 13

Lazyweb: is there a list of the most popular Tumblr blogs anywhere?

(Probably where “most popular” = “highest trafficked”).

Was just thinking this would be interesting (and probably surprising) to peruse. There’s no such global list in Tumblr’s exisiting tag-based directory, and while I could probably figure out a vague chartby looking at subdomains of Tumblr.com using Google/Compete, it might be a bit crude. And require effort.

Nov 29

Dave Winer has started using Tumblr

(He’s the godfather of RSS/podcasting, an Internet veteran and one of the smartest thinkers on the future of communication and the web that I know of).

Winer mostly uses Tumblr to talk about RSS Cloud, his contribution to the real-time web.

Sep 15

Tumblr’s tag channels need to filter out posts that aren’t in your language

Too many posts with non-Latin character sets :-(

ONML: http://kindofbloop.com/

ONML: the obligatory (or optional!) non-meta link

Tumblr posts about Tumblr should include an ONML ;-)

Sep 7

“I get so much more joy from reading my Twitter friends or looking at my Tumblr stream than from using a feed reader.” “RSS is not dead, it just REALLY sucks compared to Twitter” says UX Hero

Aug 21

marco:

[…]
I now have a decently successful blog with a non-zero audience of mostly cool people that earns a small profit with tasteful ads that don’t rely on distracting people. My posts sometimes end up on aggregators even though I never try to promote them. And this all takes far less time and hassle than it used to.

Some of this is the technology: since I started writing online, web publishing has become much easier, and the quality of tools and hosting available for free has skyrocketed. But I can’t help but blame most of the turnaround on my change of priorities: I started writing for myself and for the sake of it, and I stopped trying to be successful or be my own boss or make money with AdSense. And it worked.

[…]

I really like Marco’s writing - he’s an interesting and intelligent guy. On a couple of occasions has been kind enough to correspond with me when I’ve had questions about something he’s written.

But the statistician/economist/pedant in me wants ask, “is Marco confusing correlation with causation?”. Basically - Tumblr’s fortunes have been greatly on the up recently, and deservedly so. So is the popularity of Marco’s blog truly due to him “writing for himself”, or the increased popularity of a community that he’s a figurehead/creator of?

Of course, there’s probably an element of both, and “writing for yourself” can’t be a bad thing. I’m just not sure whether “problogger” strategies should be completely written off, as annoying as they may be.

Either way, congrats Marco on the success of your blog, and keep making me click that “like” button :-)