David's Log

Rachel needs a roommate in NYC (Church Ave on the Q/B trains) to take her extra gigantic bedroom for June 1st.  Details here

nostrich had some really insightful points and questions about the new Directory:

The directory is being touted as a way to find blogs that are “gaining momentum”. But how does listing the most popular 7 blogs in a particular category help anyone except the popular people?

Simply, Tumblarity isn’t a metric of popularity.  We’ve tried to design Tumblarity to reflect how active and interesting your blog is at this moment.  That means anyone (even someone brand new to Tumblr) can create something that resonates with the community and in turn bubbles them up to the top for people to discover.

One great example:  During our testing, Jessica Chu had the highest overall Tumblarity, mostly to the credit of one super-viral post.  Today, she’s #45.  It might not be immediately apparent, but these rankings fluctuate a lot.

Of course, it’s an algorithm.  The results will be different from discovering a like-minded blogger in your neighborhood, or happening upon a fascinating photo diary through a friend’s reblog.  We’ve been aiming to offer lots of unique ways to discover people.

I think letting users tag themselves is also going to be problematic in terms of the directory’s usefulness. I’m looking at the top 7 music blogs right now, and only one of them appears to be an actual music blog. Audio posts are a feature of Tumblr, so why the heck wouldn’t the world and his wife tag their blog as music? That, in turn, dilutes the quality of the music community, and makes it essentially pointless. I can no longer go to the music listing to find music blogs, unless I’m prepared to wade through numerous blogs that just happen to post music every now and then.

The idea is: You only tag your blog “music” if it describes the “focus of” your blog.

Although I’m generally happy with the quality of the pre-defined directories, I’m pretty positive some of the noise will drop out when we open up to user-defined tags.  We’re also not opposed to letting either the community or our moderators bury irrelevant blogs, but I think tagging + Tumblarity can be self-policing.

I’m also really interested in the feedback we’ve received about letting followers tag your blog, and using that to organize the directory, rather than your own tags.

Limiting the number of tags one can apply to their blog was smart, because it will force users to think more carefully about how they want to be represented, but most blogs, I would guess, do not have more than two main areas of interest. But even now, with a two-tag limitation while the directory is in “beta” mode, I can already see that that’s not nearly enough. And it still allows one more tag to be applied, that probably won’t be very relevant.

Entirely to the credit of the guys at WeFollow, the restriction of three user-defined tags feels like a great limit, and works very well in their directory.  We’ll look at the results when we open up tagging next week.

Another thought: anyone that’s been on Tumblr for a while has probably noticed a few trends. Think soft focus photography and inspirational quotes. The nature of the Tumblr community means reblog-bait like that will do much more for you than original content will.

Some genres of posts certainly have more mainstream appeal than others.  But we’ve hopefully designed our discovery tools to be self-correcting.  The super-high Tumblarity in the Photography category, for example, isn't competing with the Fashion category.

Again, between reblogging, search, Popular Stuff, the Map, and the new Directory, we think Tumblr has come pretty far in ways to discover interesting people.

And while the Popular Stuff page is certainly noisier than my Dashboard, I still find a ton of interesting stuff there when I go looking.

More fuel for the popularity contest debate: what happened to the themes, map, and trends links? They’ve been reduced to tiny links in the footer. How many times have you looked at the footer? Would you even know where to find themes if I hadn’t just told you? It’s pretty clear that Tumblr aren’t interested in promoting talented theme designers right now.

To the contrary, promoting the brilliant stuff you guys are creating is our biggest focus these days, and why we’ve been giving so much attention to discovery.  The Theme Garden is about a week away from being rolled into the Customize page (along with a bunch of other fixes to the theme submission/approval process), where your themes will wind up getting a lot more love from users.

Another thing: Why are the only users advertised in that promotion spot on the directory celebrities or already very well known blogs? I thought we were promoting lesser known blogs, not celebrities.

We haven’t decided how we want to use the promo-spot yet, but we did want to have it in there for launch.  Not much thought went into the selection.  Feel free to email me a 188x100 promo (and link) if you have something cool you want to plug.

Another: Blogs marked as NSFW (check your customization page if you haven’t found this feature yet) are flat out not allowed in the directory, it appears. The TOS states that all users must be over 18 (yes, yes, we all know most of them aren’t), so why? The option might as well be analogous with the “promote me” option. I’m sure they plan to do something more useful with this in the future, but right now: broken. (And I know Tumblr probably don’t want to get anyone fired from their job, but what’s wrong with a simple indicator of NSFW-ness, instead of total banishment?)

We haven’t decided exactly how they’ll be represented, but NSFW blogs will be included in the Directory.  They’ll either be labeled as such within the rankings, or they’ll be segregated within the Directory.  One of the reasons it’s still in beta :)