ROGUE BICYCLES

i know it doesn’t matter but what really bothers me about this whole...

ohrohin:

via annicka:

i know it doesn’t matter

but what really bothers me about this whole post-it thing

is that it represents the organization’s unwillingness to explore tumblr’s potential

i love tumblr so much. so much. it is one of the most important things in my life. no joke.

it has given birth to some totally unique interactions and behaviors over the past five years

but what has tumblr actually done to encourage that growth?

or even provide a basic search function so that researchers like me can begin to understand the breadth of these new behaviors and communities?

it’s really a bummer to watch them (tumblr leadership?) willfully deny the opportunity that it holds in terms of both development and research

being an effective and engaged tumblr user is basically to be a fish swimming upstream against all of the inefficiencies and psychodrama either ignored or created by the staff

Annicka is really onto something here. I keep thinking about the rolling Tumblr blackouts, the refusal to work with Missing-E, and a few of the friendships I’ve formed, with writers and non-writers alike. There is a great deal of incredible content being created on Tumblr everyday. Tumblr could harness what its users are doing and create its own empire of verticalized sites like Gawker Media, Mediaite, or Spiers-era NYO. They could form lucrative brand partnerships—and not through the ineffective marketing and overpriced campaigns to legacy brands.

There are talented writers, publishers, cooks, artists, pop stars, actors, illustrators—creators of content all on Tumblr. But gimmicky $1 e-post-its is not the most sustainable way to monetize them. Finding a way to showcase the sheer breadth of this content, perhaps on a separate Tumblr-managed portal that does accept bids for media buys seems like the next logical step with regards to this.

Tumblr is going through a bit of an awkward puberty phase now. It is reluctant to accept media buys, to accept a conventional means of making money, but if it were to do just that, it could charge top dollar and attract the brightest brands. Surely this is an agenda that’s being pushed around on the inside there. It will be interesting to see what it looks like when a version of this model does inevitably spawn on Tumblr. It cannot remain in the liminal “start-up” phase forever.

the revolution will not be post-it’d.