- Dangerous Minds looks/u> at obscure 1970s glam punk band Rouge, from Japan.
- Dangerous Minds points readers to the excellent David Bowie fan comic, the biographical "The Side Effects of the Cocaine".
- Taylor Swift made a wonderful donation to the Regent Park School of Music.
- I do agree with Anne T. Donahue at CBC Arts Mthat country music needs more of the innovative challenges brought by the Dixie Chicks.
- CityLab shares a playlist of songs dealing, in one way or another, with maps.
[BLOG] Some Friday links
May. 3rd, 2019 01:37 pm- Architectuul takes a look at "infrastructural scars", at geopolitically-inspired constructions like border fences and fortifications.
- Centauri Dreams notes what we can learn from 99942 Apophis during its 2029 close approach to Earth, just tens of thousands of kilometres away.
- D-Brief reports on the reactions of space artists to the photograph of the black hole at the heart of M87.
- Dangerous Minds shares the first recording of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.
- The Dragon's Tales notes that Germany has begun work on drafting laws to cover space mining.
- Gizmodo reports on what scientists have learned from the imaging of a very recent impact of an asteroid on the near side of the Moon.
- io9 makes the case that Star Trek: Discovery should try to tackle climate change.
- Joe. My. God. notes that Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr. (Wouldn't it be funny if it was bought, as other reports suggest might be possible, by Pornhub?)
- JSTOR Daily reports on a 1910 examination of medical schools that, among other things, shut down all but two African-American medical schools with lasting consequences for African-American health.
- Language Log asks why "Beijing" is commonly pronounced as "Beizhing".
- Simon Balto asks at Lawyers, Guns and Money why the murder of Justine Ruszczyk by a Minneapolis policeman is treated more seriously than other police killings, just because she was white and the cop was black. All victims deserve the same attention.
- Russell Darnley at Maximos62 shares a video of the frieze of the Parthenon.
- The NYR Daily responds to the 1979 television adaptation of the Primo Levi novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, an examination of (among other things) the problems of development.
- Peter Rukavina is entirely right about the practical uselessness of QR codes.
- Daniel Little at Understanding Society points readers towards the study of organizations, concentrating on Charles Perrow.
- Window on Eurasia notes the argument of one Russian commentator that Russia should offer to extend citizenship en masse not only to Ukrainians but to Belarusians, the better to undermine independent Belarus.
- Arnold Zwicky shares photos of some of his flourishing flowers, as his home of Palo Alto enters a California summer.
- CityLab takes a look at Geocities, one of the first online platforms for websites, looking at how it tried to create and maintain online neighbourhoods.
- Ars Technica looks at the promise--sadly unfulfilled--of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender.
- Think Progress notes, more than a month after the purge by Tumblr of NSFW blogs, the far right remains active there.
- This Huffington Post India article looks at the rising presence of pro-Hindutva answers put forth by Indian users on Quora.
- Ars Technica notes that researchers can now, even if you do not actively participate on social media, predict what your content would likely be.
- Slate notes that the example of LiveJournal, a popular social networking site that went under when its owners cracked down on fandom, should concern the owners of Tumblr.
- Hornet Stories notes that the crackdown on NSFW work on Tumblr will impact LGBTQ people disproportionately.
- Nathalie Graham at the Stranger notes what the crackdown on NSFW content on Tumblr might indicate about the future of the Internet, among other things.
- Sean Captain at Fast Company looks at the desperate efforts of archivists to preserve some 700 thousand NSFW Tumblr blogs for posterity.
- This Wired article looks at alternatives to Tumblr, like Dreamwidth and Pillowfort. Each is promising but each lacks some of the specific advantages of Tumblr.
- My own Tumblr, incidentally, is A Bit More Detail. It will still be online: I still find it useful, and do not find a need to abandon this community as I did LiveJournal.
[BLOG] Some Thursday links
Dec. 13th, 2018 12:41 pm- Anthro{dendum} considers ways to simulate urgency in simulations of climate change.
- Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers what could possibly have led to a Mars crater near Biblis Patera, on Tharsis, having such a flat bottom.
- Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog gives readers some tips as to what they should see in New York City.
- Centauri Dreams notes some of the early returns sent back by the OSIRIS-REx probe from asteroid Bennu.
- The Crux notes the limits of genetic determinism in explaining human behaviour, given the huge influence of the environment on the expression of genes and more.
- D-Brief suggests that the rapid global dispersion of the domestic chicken, a bird visibly distinct from its wild counterparts, might make an excellent marker of the Anthropocene millions of years hence.
- Bruce Dorminey notes that Comet 46 P/Wirtanen is set to come within a bit more than eleven million kilometres of the Earth next week, and that astronomers are ready.
- L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing suggests that the Internet, by exposing everything, makes actual innovation difficult.
- JSTOR Daily takes a look at the innovative art of early 20th century Expressionist Charlotte Salomon, a person not only groundbreaking with her autobiographical painting series but linked to a murder mystery, too.
- Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca about what she has learned in six years about blogging there abut language.
- Sara Jayyousi writes at the LRB Blog about her experiences over time with a father imprisoned for nearly a decade and a half on false charges of supporting terrorism.
- Marginal Revolution shares Tyler Cowen's argument that Macron's main problem is that he lacks new ideas, something to appeal to the masses.
- Sylvain Cypel at the NYR Daily argues that Macron, arguably never that popular, is facing a Marie Antoinette moment, the Yellow Jackets filling the place of the sans culottes.
- Drew Rowsome rightly laments the extent to which social media, including not just Facebook but even Tumblr, are currently waging a war against any visible sex in any context.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how, in 2019, astronomers will finally have imaged the event horizon around the black hole Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
- Window on Eurasia reports on polls which suggest that young Belarusians are decidedly apolitical.
- them interviews Troy Lee Hudson, the engineer working on NASA's InSight Mars who has gone viral as #ScienceDaddy, letting him talk about Mars and about being an out scientist.
- Stefanie Duguay at The Conversation writes about how the new Tumblr ban on NSFW content will harm young LGBTQ people, by depriving them of community and information.
- Rinaldo Walcott at Daily Xtra makes the case for downsizing Pride Toronto to better fit community needs and desires.
- The Canadian federal government has created a new Canada Pride Citation, available to present and past LGBTQ employees of the federal government, including many who were persecuted for their sexual orientation. Global News reports.
- them reports on how gentrification in the leather community in San Francisco impacts the wider city.
- VICE's Motherboard suggests that the crackdown on anything NSFW on Tumblr can be blamed on the expanding power of the Apple Store, one element of its indiscriminate sanitization of the Internet.
- Garrett Carr at 1843 Magazine takes a look at Lough Foyle, the northern Irish bay that will become part of a hard border come Brexit.
- Giant African snails, Sarah Laskow suggests at Atlas Obscura, have spread so widely in recent centuries thanks to humanity that the presence of their shells might well be a noticeable marker of the Anthropocene.
- At Toronto Life, sculptor Gillian Genser tells the heartbreaking story of how she was poisoned by the heavy metals contained in the mussel shells that she used as raw materials for a sculpture.
- Evan Gough at Universe Today reports the claim of some archaeologists that, 3700 years ago, the city of Tell el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor that exploded above it with the force of a large nuclear warhead. Inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah?
- JSTOR Daily considers the question of whether the movie A Star Is Born made Judy Garland a gay icon.
- Daily Xtra shares a first-person account telling the truth about how The Kids in The Hall gave young queer audiences an idea that escape is possible. (It was for me.)
- This Daily Xtra account shares one watcher's account of learning to accept being black and gay by watching The Wire.
- Tumblr, Daily Xtra notes, is still a powerful platform that allows queer people to meet.
- We really should, as this VICE interview notes, be watching more queer TV.
Two weekends ago, I had to reset the passwords on my different social networks. My E-mail had somehow become compromised, and my Facebook was briefly used to post spam in a single discussion group, so everything had to be changed, immediately.
I had to go to Facebook; I had to go to Livejournal, that site that started everything; Google+ and my linked accounts at Blogger and YouTube had to go; Tumblr was followed by Instagram and then by Flickr; my Twitter and LinkedIn, more peripheral than not, had to be changed. Even the Dreamwidth that is basically a backup for Livejournal, and the other sites (Quora, Goodreads, Yelp) that are functionally closely linked to Facebook, had to be changed.
What about you? Where are you active?
I had to go to Facebook; I had to go to Livejournal, that site that started everything; Google+ and my linked accounts at Blogger and YouTube had to go; Tumblr was followed by Instagram and then by Flickr; my Twitter and LinkedIn, more peripheral than not, had to be changed. Even the Dreamwidth that is basically a backup for Livejournal, and the other sites (Quora, Goodreads, Yelp) that are functionally closely linked to Facebook, had to be changed.
What about you? Where are you active?
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Mar. 2nd, 2016 11:04 am- blogTO notes that yesterday morning's transit crunch led Uber to introduce surge pricing.
- Dangerous Minds links to the Tumblr blog Vintage Occult, which has a vast collection of vintage occult.
- Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig notes how the television show Castle badly misrepresented the Geordie dialect.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a new archeological survey in Greenland.
- Marginal Revolution worries about the collapse of the Schengen zone.
- The Planetary Society Blog notes that Dawn has achieved its primary science work at Ceres.
- The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers how Mexico might defend itself in response to a Trump administration. Read the comments.
- Shadow, Light and Colour's Elizabeth Beattie shares a photo of a koi she found living in the sheltered pools of the Evergreen BrickWorks.
- Torontoist examines Toronto's civic tech community.
- Towleroad notes Ian Thorpe did not come out because of media pressure when he was a teenager and looks at a British television documentary about a gay sex club.
Rapper Azealia Banks had the best response to Donald Trump's pride in his Time cover story.

Found on Tumblr, via lazy-native from doritolocostacosupreme.

Found on Tumblr, via lazy-native from doritolocostacosupreme.
Gay Star News reports on the disappearance of Leelah Alcorn's Tumblr account. All I can say is that at least her words and images were very widely shared before the account disappeared. If someone was trying to hide her, they failed.
The erasure of every trace of Leelah Alcorn's short life online continued today with the apparent removal, from Tumblr, of her 'satan's wifey' account.
It was from here, earlier this week, that the Ohio teen posted two notes shortly before her death, claiming that her parents' refusal to accept that she was transgender made it impossible for her to continue to live.
Those searching for Leelah's account are now greeted by a standard Tumblr 'not found' page, which states: 'There's nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn't currently exist at this address. Unless you were looking for this error page, in which case: Congrats! You totally found it.'
At time of writing, Gay Star News been unable to contact Tumblr to ask what has occurred.
However, an investigation last year revealed that Tumblr appeared to have banned a number of tags from its mobile app, including 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'bisexual' and 'transsexual.'
They had also banned 'depression' and 'suicide.'
Leelah's last posts may have been removed either because she claimed to be transgender - or because their content related to suicide. This would not, however, explain why her entire blog, including artwork and images that she created for her sisters, has now gone.
This morning, I linked to Towleroad's report about the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a trans teen in Ohio who killed herself in despair over her life. Before she did so, she prepared a suicide note which she posted on her Tumblr.
This note has since been shared nearly two hundred thousand times as of now. (When I first saw it a few hours ago, it had well under a hundred thousand.) In addition, Leelah's suicide note has managed to make national, even international news.
This is so terribly sad. All I can do at this stage is express my hope that this note, by putting a face to the struggles of trans teenagers, will help humanize them.
It's better to notice a problem late than not to notice it at all, and Leelah's death may mean quite a lot. Even so, her death can't help but mean much less than her life, if only she had been able to continue.
When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.
My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.
When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.
[. . .]
After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.
That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.
This note has since been shared nearly two hundred thousand times as of now. (When I first saw it a few hours ago, it had well under a hundred thousand.) In addition, Leelah's suicide note has managed to make national, even international news.
This is so terribly sad. All I can do at this stage is express my hope that this note, by putting a face to the struggles of trans teenagers, will help humanize them.
It's better to notice a problem late than not to notice it at all, and Leelah's death may mean quite a lot. Even so, her death can't help but mean much less than her life, if only she had been able to continue.
I'm on Ello, @randy_mcdonald. I have only 19 friends there, and activity--mine, theirs--seems to have dwindled. This makes me feel as if the discouraging conclusions of a Charles Arthur article in The Guardian have credence.
I did hear quite a lot about Ello. How could I not? Half my friends on Facebook are queer and/or arty people, just the sorts of demographics that inclined strongly towards Facebook. There was a lot of talk of adoption, and a lot of interest in the idea. Citylab's Kriston Capps enthused about the modular vision of Ello, as described by its founder Paul Budnitz.
Over at Towleroad, Charles Pulliam-Moore looked at the queer leanings of Ello, occupying a particular niche.
Boingboing Glen Fleishman suggested, though, that Ello wasn't ready for prime time. The New Yorker's Vauhini Vara also made that point at the end of a sympathetic profile of the company and its ethos.
Did Ello launch too early? Is Facebook too all-encompassing? (I know of no one who left Facebook for Ello.) Or might Ello yet grow to occupy a stable niche?
Interest in Ello, the ad-free social network posited as a rival to Facebook, seems to be collapsing, according to data from Google Trends.
A graph of searches in the past 30 days on “Ello” shows that after an early peak on 26 September, followed by a higher one on 30 September, the number of searches has now declined to a level almost as low as on 23 September, when the network was just starting to grow.
[. . .]
Ello opened to the public on 7 August with 90 users on an invite-only basis. By early October it could claim more than 1 million users and to be receiving up to 100,000 invite requests per day.
[. . .]
Interest in Ello, measured in terms of web searches, seems to have peaked at about one-tenth that of Twitter - a relatively high measure, but miniscule compared to Facebook, which garners 95% of searches relating to the three companies over the period, while Twitter gets between 4% and the remaining 5%.
I did hear quite a lot about Ello. How could I not? Half my friends on Facebook are queer and/or arty people, just the sorts of demographics that inclined strongly towards Facebook. There was a lot of talk of adoption, and a lot of interest in the idea. Citylab's Kriston Capps enthused about the modular vision of Ello, as described by its founder Paul Budnitz.
"Look at the iPhone. You get the iPhone, it’s this awesome simple thing. It has most of what you need on it," Budnitz says. But no one leaves it at that. "Almost everyone chooses something that they like—a special map app, a weather app. But the basic iPhone is great!"
Ello is designed to be a microcosm of the iPhone: Users will eventually be able to choose from an "enormous" feature list (if they want). Some of those features will effect the look and feel of Ello, while others will enhance its functionality. For example: Artists, journalists, musicians, and other public professionals may want to have two accounts with one sign-in: one personal, one professional. Pay a buck or two, and you can have that function. Or toggle between two accounts.
Critics aren't convinced this model can work. Appropriately enough, one of the first reports about Ello's first round of venture funding (if not the first report) came from Ello user @waxpancake. "Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values," he observes. (In a followup, @waxpancake clarifies that he hopes Ello succeeds.)
Budnitz pushes back against this criticism. Facebook is a giant company, Budnitz says, because Facebook requires an enormous staff of data analysts, advertisers, and marketers. With a handful of staff, Ello already counts millions of users, and it works—albeit not perfectly in its beta stage.
"We’re going to prove that the Internet doesn’t have to be one giant billboard," Budnitz says. "This company’s Vermont-based. It’s the only state of the union that doesn’t allow billboards."
Over at Towleroad, Charles Pulliam-Moore looked at the queer leanings of Ello, occupying a particular niche.
Ello doesn’t seem to have a means of determining a user’s sexual orientation, but Budnitz has said that his team has seen a particular spike in new LGBT users. According to Budnitz, Ello’s LGBT userbase is playing a “particularly helpful [role] in shaping their development going forward,” which could mean a number of different things.
[. . .]
As timely as comparisons to Facebook may be, Ello would have a much better shot at becoming the social for edgy, artistic gays by borrowing from Tumblr. Though Tumblr has made a name for itself for being a lightweight, customizable blogging tool for the masses, the service owes a large part of its success to its highly active community of pornography curators.
Tumblr hosts a wide variety of mature content ranging from hardcore, animated gifsets to erotic prose and poetry. Diving into Tumblr’s depths proves not only that Rule 34 is very real, but also that vibrant, engaged non-sexually explicit communities can exist on the same platform as the raunchiest of skin flicks. Straddling that gap could be the key to Ello’s future success.
Boingboing Glen Fleishman suggested, though, that Ello wasn't ready for prime time. The New Yorker's Vauhini Vara also made that point at the end of a sympathetic profile of the company and its ethos.
Did Ello launch too early? Is Facebook too all-encompassing? (I know of no one who left Facebook for Ello.) Or might Ello yet grow to occupy a stable niche?
James Nicoll linked to a Techcrunch article describing how the new CEO of Livejournal wants to position this blogging platform as a kind of Medium, as a place for long-form writing.
Hmm.
This proposal certainly does seem to reflect the way Livejournal is now used. Of the people active on my friends list, most of them are people who write long-form entries. Many of them are, in fact, published authors. Rejigging the non-Cyrillic functions of Livejournal to service this demographic does work.
And yet. Is this an innovative effort to position Livejournal as a platform of choice for long-range writing, perhaps even social journalism, or is this trying to take some advantage of the fact that the users who have remained are too locked to their journals and communities to move? I've migrated already: this text is being entered into a window at Dreamwidth, which then automatically posts to Livejournal, and will be cut-and-pasted over to WordPress. Making Livejournal an active hub for me again, as opposed to a second-order backup with a friends page I visit, will take some doing.
There's also the non-trivial question of whether or not Livejournal can make these changes without alienating its user base. Not a week ago, I was perturbed to find out that Livejournal had switched the user interface entirely. I couldn't locate my aforementioned friends page. It was only when I found out, via a LJ friend's post, how to switch the user interface back to a usable format. I fear that Livejournal may yet change it back. I had no idea this particularly was coming, but the idea that Livejournal's administrators would unilaterally change something critical of the site without letting its users know is sadly not a surprise. The commenters at Techcrunch shared their own stories of how the site has let them down. Navigating a revamp of the site without angering frequently disappointed long-time users is going to be an issue.
I hope Livejournal can survive in some form, but I will need to be convinced. We'll see what will happen.
LiveJournal is hanging out the “under new management” banner yet again. Last month, the company announced a new CEO, Katya Akudovich, who previously worked at Google, Box and Microsoft. Akudovich was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the board of directors, who believe her international experience at these major tech companies will help her make LiveJournal a top social media platform yet again.
“My Box experience, where I started the Deal Desk department, gave me unique insights into how a company turbo-charged an amazing product,” she tells us. “At Google, it was about bringing the right content in the right form to brand new Google Play markets. And this is exactly what we’re planning to do at LJ,” Akudovich says.
In addition to the new services Akudovich teases, LiveJournal is also rolling out new iOS and Android applications next month, designed to appeal to both writers and readers. And the company is hopping on the ‘anonymity’ bandwagon, now in vogue thanks to services like Whisper, Yik Yak and Secret, noting that LiveJournal “will remain anonymous and will never ask its users to identify themselves.”
[. . .]LJ’s new strategy for 2014 and beyond is one where it hopes to promote itself as a platform for longer-form content and self-expression in an era when users can’t seem bothered to post status updates, preferring Instagram selfies, looping Vine clips, GIFs and texts over longer articles, lengthy videos, and the like.
But that, thinks LiveJournal, is the opportunity.
“There’s a big market for this that really only we and Medium are filling – and with significantly more personalization, while still being easy to use,” says Akudovich. “Our users generate an amazing amount of deep content - half a million long-form posts a day – these are not tweets, these are real long-form posts where people write some very interesting things. We have amazing communities too,” she says.
Hmm.
This proposal certainly does seem to reflect the way Livejournal is now used. Of the people active on my friends list, most of them are people who write long-form entries. Many of them are, in fact, published authors. Rejigging the non-Cyrillic functions of Livejournal to service this demographic does work.
And yet. Is this an innovative effort to position Livejournal as a platform of choice for long-range writing, perhaps even social journalism, or is this trying to take some advantage of the fact that the users who have remained are too locked to their journals and communities to move? I've migrated already: this text is being entered into a window at Dreamwidth, which then automatically posts to Livejournal, and will be cut-and-pasted over to WordPress. Making Livejournal an active hub for me again, as opposed to a second-order backup with a friends page I visit, will take some doing.
There's also the non-trivial question of whether or not Livejournal can make these changes without alienating its user base. Not a week ago, I was perturbed to find out that Livejournal had switched the user interface entirely. I couldn't locate my aforementioned friends page. It was only when I found out, via a LJ friend's post, how to switch the user interface back to a usable format. I fear that Livejournal may yet change it back. I had no idea this particularly was coming, but the idea that Livejournal's administrators would unilaterally change something critical of the site without letting its users know is sadly not a surprise. The commenters at Techcrunch shared their own stories of how the site has let them down. Navigating a revamp of the site without angering frequently disappointed long-time users is going to be an issue.
I hope Livejournal can survive in some form, but I will need to be convinced. We'll see what will happen.
I began my online presence on Usenet, but my first participation in formal social networks. began here on Livejournal. I've remained on Livejournal, but since then there have been migrations, of blog content to WordPress (secondarily to Dreamwidth) and of everything to Facebook. There's some specialty networks I take part in at a low level--Flickr and Tumblr for photos, Goodreads for books, Yelp! for reviews of restaurants and stores, Quora for debate--but that's it.
You?
You?
Yahoo, as any number of news media (like the Financial Post, has bought Tumblr.
Yahoo has also radically upgraded Flickr.
As a long-time Flickr user, I'm excited by the upgrade. As a novice Tumblr user, I only hope Yahoo doesn't screw it up (the fact that Marissa Mayer has had to promise not to do that worries me). I do find it worth noting that, between Flickr and Tumblr and my Yahoo Mail account, I make more use of my Yahoo account than I do my Google account, and that with the impending demise of Google Reader my usage of Google will diminish accordingly. I just use Google to search; I do my business on Yahoo.
Is this common, I wonder?
Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.
Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.
Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.
Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.
Yahoo has also radically upgraded Flickr.
[T]he big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.
Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.
As a long-time Flickr user, I'm excited by the upgrade. As a novice Tumblr user, I only hope Yahoo doesn't screw it up (the fact that Marissa Mayer has had to promise not to do that worries me). I do find it worth noting that, between Flickr and Tumblr and my Yahoo Mail account, I make more use of my Yahoo account than I do my Google account, and that with the impending demise of Google Reader my usage of Google will diminish accordingly. I just use Google to search; I do my business on Yahoo.
Is this common, I wonder?
Something about the way I sank into the chair and yawning last night around 8 o'clock caused my to pop my my right temporomandibular joint, since it has caused me a lot of hassle. First I had to call Telehealth to be sure and get told that I should check it one, then I had to go to a walk-in clinic downtown to be told that I should see my dentist, then I walk down the street to my dentist and make an appointment for a week's time, then I have to go home with the strong suggestion that I should rest the jaw for the next bit, this rest including no "jaw jaw jaw." This unpleasantness, along with the strong desire to keep my dull pain from becoming actual shooting pain never mind wake-up-screaming-in-the-night pain, means that a pleasant night based on oral communication isn't going to be. Tabernac.
What will I do instead? Electronic communication will suffice nicely for the next bit, which works out since I wanted to write a blog post that began with Tumblr. A microblogging site like Twitter that includes an ability to readily share photos and video, this social networking service got some coverage recently in the free daily TTC-ubiquitous Metro, "Ups and Downs of a Tumblette's Life". "Tumblette."
(Jamie-Leigh's Tumblr blog is here. I like.)
Many of the Tumblr elements described above--the ability to share and reshare links, the ability to construct communities of readers, and so on--have been active functions of any number of blogging platforms and social networking systems for years. boasts about the Telegraph that "the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."
What interested me most about the article apart from its content was the way it positioned a certain demographic as core, 20-something women who are quite active and often very open online. This sort of association with an online social networking service with a stereotype isn't unfamiliar, and may not even be inaccurate, since social networks are famously lumpy. We're familiar with how MySpace is especially common among musicians and certain American socioeconomic classes, how Orkut surprisingly came to dominate the Brazilian and take off in absolute numbers in India, how English Canada went Facebook-mad long before French Canada, the networks which ensure LinkedIn is populated very largely by professionals and professional-wannabes, and, closer to home, the way that Livejournal is famously big among Russophones. My own blog presence is based on Livejournal since that's the platform where my friends and acquaintances were, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the sort of thing that influenced all my readers at some point. One may as well be amazed that Flickr's users use that service to store and reproduce images.
Some stereotypes are accurate, even useful. Others, not so much. The use of the diminuitive "ette" to describe hard-core users of Tumblr struck me as interesting, inasmuch as "ette" is one of those terms that is either sexist or reclaimed from sexism. The latter is the one that applies here, but real stigma is elsewhere. I think particularly about how some talk about Livejournal as an embarrassing wasteland populated by whiny teenagers. While I was flattered when one blogger years ago cited A Bit More Detail as one of the few good things on Livejournal, I was not impressed even more by the insult paid to the hundreds of Livejournal users who are as interesting bloggers as anyone. Are Blogspot and Typepad really that much better? This prejudice has even been internalized: the maintainers of the very interesting
russiamagazine community preface most of their posts by saying that the "Russian blogosphere conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ."
I don't like this prejudice. Negative stereotypes are always bad, especially the sweeping ones, never mind how these particular ones discourage some from taking full ("Why use Livejournal if people won't take me seriously?") and lead others to ignorantly reject huge, perfectly enjoyable, swathes of our great global online community. It's inevitable that the prejudice that infects humanity generally would manifest itself in this specific form, I suppose, and the sheer size of the online community makes picking-and-choosing inevitable regardless of the motives involved, too, but I still feel let down. What happened to the dreams of unfettered global community? More, was wanting to believe in them really inevitable?
What will I do instead? Electronic communication will suffice nicely for the next bit, which works out since I wanted to write a blog post that began with Tumblr. A microblogging site like Twitter that includes an ability to readily share photos and video, this social networking service got some coverage recently in the free daily TTC-ubiquitous Metro, "Ups and Downs of a Tumblette's Life". "Tumblette."
Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.
[. . . ]
On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.
“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”
At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.
It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.
Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.
Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.
(Jamie-Leigh's Tumblr blog is here. I like.)
Many of the Tumblr elements described above--the ability to share and reshare links, the ability to construct communities of readers, and so on--have been active functions of any number of blogging platforms and social networking systems for years. boasts about the Telegraph that "the smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."
What interested me most about the article apart from its content was the way it positioned a certain demographic as core, 20-something women who are quite active and often very open online. This sort of association with an online social networking service with a stereotype isn't unfamiliar, and may not even be inaccurate, since social networks are famously lumpy. We're familiar with how MySpace is especially common among musicians and certain American socioeconomic classes, how Orkut surprisingly came to dominate the Brazilian and take off in absolute numbers in India, how English Canada went Facebook-mad long before French Canada, the networks which ensure LinkedIn is populated very largely by professionals and professional-wannabes, and, closer to home, the way that Livejournal is famously big among Russophones. My own blog presence is based on Livejournal since that's the platform where my friends and acquaintances were, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the sort of thing that influenced all my readers at some point. One may as well be amazed that Flickr's users use that service to store and reproduce images.
Some stereotypes are accurate, even useful. Others, not so much. The use of the diminuitive "ette" to describe hard-core users of Tumblr struck me as interesting, inasmuch as "ette" is one of those terms that is either sexist or reclaimed from sexism. The latter is the one that applies here, but real stigma is elsewhere. I think particularly about how some talk about Livejournal as an embarrassing wasteland populated by whiny teenagers. While I was flattered when one blogger years ago cited A Bit More Detail as one of the few good things on Livejournal, I was not impressed even more by the insult paid to the hundreds of Livejournal users who are as interesting bloggers as anyone. Are Blogspot and Typepad really that much better? This prejudice has even been internalized: the maintainers of the very interesting
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
I don't like this prejudice. Negative stereotypes are always bad, especially the sweeping ones, never mind how these particular ones discourage some from taking full ("Why use Livejournal if people won't take me seriously?") and lead others to ignorantly reject huge, perfectly enjoyable, swathes of our great global online community. It's inevitable that the prejudice that infects humanity generally would manifest itself in this specific form, I suppose, and the sheer size of the online community makes picking-and-choosing inevitable regardless of the motives involved, too, but I still feel let down. What happened to the dreams of unfettered global community? More, was wanting to believe in them really inevitable?