“A third of Tumblr's active users come from households with incomes above $100,000 per year, giving it higher income skew than Facebook or Twitter, according to Comscore, the Web analytics firm.”
—Yahoo Tumblr Acquisition: It’s About Young People With Money
I can haz job!!!
Well a part-time job, that is. But I essentially created the job myself and made shit happen!
Remember my post about not getting the job I interviewed for at the company I really loved and adored and so badly wanted to work for but didn’t get because they wanted to re-evaluate the position? Well I sent him my proposal to run their social media as a contractor and within 2 hours he had responded “Let’s do it!”
He asked me to come out to Brooklyn today to meet with him and his creative agency to get an idea about the voice of the brand and talk about next steps. I drew up a pretty standard contract that he signed and now that I’m all official and stuff I can finally talk about it. SQUEEEEEEEEE!
The terms are 15 hours per week which is a great place to start. I am already planning to make myself invaluable to them so that by the time they’re ready to hire someone full time, I’ll already be there and be the obvious choice.
Also now I can say the company is a fast casual restaurant chain here in NYC called Dig Inn Seasonal Market. I’ve been eating there since a friend introduced me to it about 6 months ago. All of their food is healthy and delicious and comes from local, sustainable farms. They just opened a 6th location in SoHo and are continuing to expand. I’m so incredibly passionate about their food and their philosophy that you don’t have to be a health food martyr to eat well.
I’m so proud of myself for creating my own opportunity. It isn’t something I would have ever thought to do before working with my behavioral therapist. This shit really works! Now just on to the next step of turning this into a full-time gig so that I can both do what I love and love what I do.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” ―Joseph Campbell
“I’ll give you the most logical conclusion kids are ditching Facebook—one that none of the articles I read on the Great Teenage Facebook Exodus mentioned. And the evidence that supports the theory is right there in the Piper Jaffray survey. But first let’s define Facebook. What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances. You know what kids call that? School.”
—Cliff Watson
An ode to tumblr, my true love
Two years ago, I had no idea what tumblr was. My first introduction to this site happened because I was in charge of the online publicity for our BFA Senior Thesis show - it’s still online. Even then, I hardly understood what it was; we didn’t follow anyone and basically used the blog as a hosting site for our artwork.
I graduated, and over the summer my mind was occupied with the idea of blogging. I did some research about tumblr to find out what it was all about (I still don’t get it), and came to the conclusion that if I was interested in blogging at all, having a community like that behind tumblr was going to be my best bet at getting my message into the world. When I decided to launch my own tumblr (formerly UMZoology, now TheBrainScoop), it was immediately well-received, and I had a few hundred followers within the first month.
My tumblr grew, was featured in the Museum tag, gained popularity. My tumblr helped me get into graduate school, as it demonstrated a knowledge of social media and community-building. My tumblr and its audience got Hank’s attention when he first visited our museum, and my tumblr remains what I believe to be my fundamental foothold in the Internet community. I’ve grown intensely fond of it. I firmly believe that I owe everything that has come of my life through museum work to tumblr. That sounds an awful lot like a kind of cult mentality, but if two years ago I hadn’t decided to start blogging about my museum work, none of this would have come to fruition as it did.
If Yahoo buys tumblr and everything changes for the worse, I will definitely be disappointed. I’m aware all good things come to an end, but this site has given me so many opportunities beyond my wildest dreams that I can’t even imagine robbing other people of those possibilities - that is, if they choose to pursue a tumblr outside of the Supernatural/Dr. Who/Sherlock fandoms, at least. Regardless, something else will inevitably crop up and take its place. If that’s the case, I’m just happy I was given a chance to create my own little niche in our happy online community.
<3 You, tumblr.
Teens Are Turning Away from Facebook Because Tumblr Is Real, and Parent-Free
theatlanticwire.comTeenagers really are over Facebook. In a deep report published on Tuesday, Pew Research explains that teenagers departing the social network’s blue confines are looking for something more… authentic. Which, ironically, was the initial draw of Facebook, and has become something of a calling card for Tumblr and Twitter. Somewhere, Marissa Mayer is smiling.
“There are no stats programs here. There is no like button.”
Michele Catalano writes about moving back to her blog hosted at her original domain, not because Yahoo bought Tumblr, but because she wants to get away from the likes/reblogs as validation trap:
For as long as I have wanted to be a writer – and that’s about 40 long years – there was never any part of that dream that included obsessively checking a page of statistics and judging my self worth by the numbers within. I always wrote for the sheer pleasure of it, from putting that first word down to finishing the final edit, writing has always been a labor of love. Recently, it had become just a labor.
So here I am back at my old domain, the one where I started writing publicly (ok, blogging) in 2001, the one where I started telling my stories to the world. I’m taking the majority of my writing away from tumblr, away from the hearts and reblogs, away from the instant validation. I don’t want to labor anymore. I want to love what I write. I want to love why I write.
There are no stats programs here. There is no like button. I will have no idea how many people will read each post. But I will write and I will learn to love to write again.
I was chatting with Michele on Twitter, and she said, “For the first couple of years I blogged I had no idea how many readers I had. And I was better off for it.” It reminded me of Greil Marcus, talking about the early days of Rolling Stone, when they said, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t.”
