THE RISE OF TUMBLR
Tumblr hosts more than 20.9 million total blogs.
That’s up from 7 million in January.
The WordPress platform powers 49.3 million websites.
THOUGHT: The big headline last month was that Tumblr had surpassed WordPress, which wasn’t exactly true.
WordPress offers two versions of its platform: A hosted version at WordPress.com that you can sign up for and start blogging on immediately and a self-hosted version that you have to manually install yourself.
Combined, that accounts for just under 50 million sites, a hell of a lot more than the Tumblr platform, which does not offer a self-hosted option.
The more general point that Tumblr is popular, however, remains true.
Tumblr, if you’re not familiar, is a blogging platform that is a middle-ground between Twitter and a full-fledged blogging platform like WordPress. With Tumblr, you have the ability to easily follow other Tumblr bloggers and their posts then show up in your Tumblr news feed.
What makes Tumblr and other similar sites so appealing is their ease of use and the ability to quickly post or share content. With a bookmarklet you can install on your browser toolbar, one click of a button allows you to share a photo or video you’ve come across while surfing.
I use Tumblr competitor Posterous for the eStrategy After Hours site for that very reason. I think Posterous is easier to use and gives me more flexibility; the major drawback, however, is that Posterous does not allow me to monitize my blog with ads, which Tumblr does. The major complaint with Tumblr is that, like Twitter, the service suffers from far too many outages.
But among the blogging platforms of its type, Tumblr enjoys the largest community, which is why I’m looking for a way to use my Tumblr site regularly.
I’m also a huge WordPress fan. The platform is the very definition of what open source software should be: Free, extremely flexible with the support of a huge community of developers who continue to add features and improvements.
This blog and the eStrategy.tv site is built on the self-hosted WordPress platform.
It’s not really feasible to build a full-fledged website with Tumblr or Posterous but WordPress gives you all the tools you need to build a very sophisticated site. Some of the Web’s most popular websites are built on WordPress, including the NFL and CNN sites.
The other major advantage of going with a self-hosted WordPress blog is that you have complete and utter control over your site. If you need more bandwidth, add it. If you have a service outage, you can investigate and solve the problem yourself. Most importantly, however, is you have direct access to your data. If Tumblr goes down and loses your data, well, you’re SOL.
WATCH Tumblr Founder David Karp Discuss Online Identity at eStrategy.tv.
MINNESOTA MONDAY: Minneapolis is the 1oth and Saint Paul is the 13th most active city in the nation, according to a recent Men’s Health ranking.
Thank you for fireworks.
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