How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon
There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.
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Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.
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But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.
Who’s Using Pinterest? Yup, It’s Mostly Ladies
Or, as Gizmodo calls it: “Tumblr for ladies”
Um. Isn’t Tumblr “Tumblr for ladies”? Most of the people I follow on Tumblr are women. Once again Gizmodo thinks their DudeBro outlook on the world is universal. I am so tired of DudeBros.
People Staring at Computers
An interesting project, though one that got its architect, Kyle McDonald, in trouble with the Secret Service.
via Daniel Jalkut
I worked with the awesome David Charns yesterday on this piece about the government using Tumblr.
You may have seen the State Department’s Tumblr but there are others who are joining up, too. The National Archives runs a few (Document of the Day, the Exhibits Tumblr, and one about Our Presidents). One of my favorite things yesterday was meeting up with the ladies who blog from the National Archives and talking about funny documents they have. Did you know they’ve got the Jell-O box used in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial? One woman said she came across documents from the Civil War listing the health of every horse in every regiment for EACH WEEK of the war. Crazy.
Anyway, the whole article is up on The Daily Caller. And thanks a million to Mark Coatney, the Peace Corps Tumblr people, everyone from the National Archives, and the USA.gov folks.
This was really nice work; thanks, Chelsea and David.
