I've been looking at Tumblr a lot recently. Both as a programmer-- I'm midly impressed with both their web performance and their processor, although the best article in that respect I've seen recently is from posterous, a Tumblr competitor with a much more open and interesting architecture.
That said, the other thing that I find wonderful about Tumblr is the way it has become the perfect porn source. Tumblr encourages "reblogging" (indeed, that's one of the community standards, and you can't get around it). If you like something on someone's tumblog, you can click "reblog" and that something will appear on your own tumblog, with a link back to the source. What ends up is All The World's Porn Pics get funneled and repeated on Tumblr, and various users end up with their own curated collections. You can eventually find a collection of curators whose tastes match your own.
This intrigued me, especially since Tumblr makes available all of its feeds, whether text or image or whatever, in a unified, standard RSS feed. I wrote a quick wrapper for those feeds using Liferea's scripted feed API (passing my content through two APIs and a cache... why yes, I am a geek) that allowed me to bookmark anything on Tumblr that came across my feed with a single keystroke. Eventually, the point of cadging all that stuff on my hard-drives ceased to make sense, and I created my own (currently obscure) tumblog that is nothing but reblogs.
But... and this is the big 'but'... Tumblr's community standards are not the world's. There's a ton of stuff on there I'm sure is copyrighted, and it comes down the RSS feed and gets bookmarked whether it is or not.
Is it wrong to like Tumblr porn? In some sense, it must be. I don't subscribe to any of the Furry feeds coming out of Tumblr because there were dozens of images marked "Do Not Distribute" in every single feed. But the porn feeds seem to be full of stuff that's either approved with a wink and a nod toward getting attention, or actively distributed with the hopes of garnering attention.
That said, the other thing that I find wonderful about Tumblr is the way it has become the perfect porn source. Tumblr encourages "reblogging" (indeed, that's one of the community standards, and you can't get around it). If you like something on someone's tumblog, you can click "reblog" and that something will appear on your own tumblog, with a link back to the source. What ends up is All The World's Porn Pics get funneled and repeated on Tumblr, and various users end up with their own curated collections. You can eventually find a collection of curators whose tastes match your own.
This intrigued me, especially since Tumblr makes available all of its feeds, whether text or image or whatever, in a unified, standard RSS feed. I wrote a quick wrapper for those feeds using Liferea's scripted feed API (passing my content through two APIs and a cache... why yes, I am a geek) that allowed me to bookmark anything on Tumblr that came across my feed with a single keystroke. Eventually, the point of cadging all that stuff on my hard-drives ceased to make sense, and I created my own (currently obscure) tumblog that is nothing but reblogs.
But... and this is the big 'but'... Tumblr's community standards are not the world's. There's a ton of stuff on there I'm sure is copyrighted, and it comes down the RSS feed and gets bookmarked whether it is or not.
Is it wrong to like Tumblr porn? In some sense, it must be. I don't subscribe to any of the Furry feeds coming out of Tumblr because there were dozens of images marked "Do Not Distribute" in every single feed. But the porn feeds seem to be full of stuff that's either approved with a wink and a nod toward getting attention, or actively distributed with the hopes of garnering attention.