Imzy did a lot of thinking, but more in the direction of how to make people nicer on the internet. In that sense, they are doing extremely well.
Tumblr's tag and reblog features are very powerful, and it's not just an issue of being huge. My experience has been that I can link up with people I never would have met otherwise, because it allows completely different people to congregate around a shared virtual 'community'. As you say, they're 'crowd-sourcing' the community. As much as I have complaints about Tumblr, that's actually something I like about it, and it's what draws me to the participate there.
I thought it was everything else around it that makes me lose the community feel. Like the fact that people change their name all the time, or not being able to follow discussions. But now I'm starting to wonder if that's not part and parcel of the whole Tumblr appeal.
I showed a little demo to a friend, showing how you can link posts and blogs to a fandom, and they asked 'why not use tags and let people link however they want?'. and that just brings me back to Tumblr and the free market of tagging, and whether it's even possible to do anything else.
Tumblr's tag and reblog features are very powerful, and it's not just an issue of being huge. My experience has been that I can link up with people I never would have met otherwise, because it allows completely different people to congregate around a shared virtual 'community'. As you say, they're 'crowd-sourcing' the community. As much as I have complaints about Tumblr, that's actually something I like about it, and it's what draws me to the participate there.
I thought it was everything else around it that makes me lose the community feel. Like the fact that people change their name all the time, or not being able to follow discussions. But now I'm starting to wonder if that's not part and parcel of the whole Tumblr appeal.
I showed a little demo to a friend, showing how you can link posts and blogs to a fandom, and they asked 'why not use tags and let people link however they want?'. and that just brings me back to Tumblr and the free market of tagging, and whether it's even possible to do anything else.
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