Tumblr. is a blogging platform created in 2007 in New York. It is currently owned by Yahoo! Inc. Each user can create and share his content with followers, as well as reblog what others have shared. The most common are multimedia posts containing pictures and gifs. As I checked today, on November 24th 2015, it has 265,3 millions of blogs.
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| lucie-the-human.tumblr.com |
Majority of users create fandoms- subcultures composed of fans of certain thing. It is a perfect example
of how media convergence can work. As soon as the episode of tv-series or
certain movie airs- there’s thousands of posts about it on tumblr. People
share their opinion and emotions, they comment on particular scenes. They make
gifs. And write fanfiction (majority of which is slash-ficion).
There is no way to log into tumblr. and not see
any fanfiction, the whole website is drowning in it. Tumblr. as any other
social network site has its own culture and its users behave certain way. Each
tumblr. community has its own language, usually expressed in hashtags,
catchphrases, gifs and memes.
Here’s
some examples of tags people tend to use below posts:
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| mysharona1987.tumblr.com |
So what is this phenomenon that makes millions
of people log into their blogging account every day?
Here’s some features that make tumblr. unique:
·
Anonymity – as long as you can ‘meet’ your real
life friends there- you can also use usernames and be anonymous. The only thing
that you need to sign up is an email address and you don’t need to give the
company your personal info.
·
Customization- you can customize your timeline.
Not like on facebook or twitter, where you choose your headline photo, but you
can design your blog the way you want- including the size of fonts, number of
posts displayed, shape of posts etc. If you’re not familiar with designing
website and editing HTML (although tumblr. offers some pretty easy tools to do
it) you can use one of already prepared layouts and you just add some colors,
widgets etc.
·
Simplicity- when you log into your account you
see the dashboard containing posts from people you follow. You can reblog the
multimedia, like them, or just ignore them. If you want to add your own post-
there’s a simple bar allowing it. You get to choose from text, photo, video,
quote, link, dialog or audio.
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| tumblr.com |
·
Compatibility with mobiles- there’s not many
blogging websites as mobile- friendly as tumblr.
·
Communities- tumblr. is where geeks and nerds
can feel free. They are not judged by their hobbies the way they would be on
facebook or twitter. They can share Benedict Cumberbatch’s pictures every five
minutes and will most certainly find someone who will love it.
· The
communities there are not based on geography but the thing you love. And it
doesn’t mean that friendships won’t transfer into real life. It happened more
than once that I met in real life someone that I knew on tumblr- being in a
fandom of my favorite band and meeting these people at concerts.
·
Tumblr. welcomes any kind of weirdness but it’s
also a very creative community. Lots of artist share their work- whether that
is poems, photos, drawings or music.
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| tumblr.com/ author: abstrackart |
The fandoms as a phenomenon existed long before
tumblr. was created but never before have they been so powerful and numerous.
Millions of people meet every day to discuss new Game of Thrones poster or The
Walking Dead episode. It’s quick and very entertaining. Tumblr. is more than a blogging
website, it is a social network site
that brings fandoms together.
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| Sherlock, Doctor Who and Supernatural have the biggest fandoms on tumblr |
To sum up, tumblr. is weird:
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| http://yourreactiongifs.tumblr.com/ |
It’s inspiring:
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| http://yourreactiongifs.tumblr.com/ |
It’s funny:
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| http://yourreactiongifs.tumblr.com/ |
And very, very time-consuming:
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| http://yourreactiongifs.tumblr.com/ |
Of course, as any other website tumblr. has its
downsides. Average age of the user is between 13 and 24 year old, which makes
it a little bit less mature than, let’s say, wordpress. On the other hand it’s
perfect for marketing if your target audience is that age. Also, like I
mentioned, majority of tumblr. posts are multimedia so that very long posts most
likely will not become popular and read by many. Searching for things is very easy
and with that many users it becomes very time-consuming. But in the end, it’s
a very good website that, sort of, joined the best qualities of twitter and
blogger and merged them into one. If the internet was like high school, 'cool kids' would sit by the instagram table, but nerds and geeks would go straight to tumblr.
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