AUSTIN KLEON: Kurt Vonnegut's story shapes drawn into Google Correlate
Taking a cue from Kottke, I plugged Vonnegut’s story shapes into Google Correlate using the drawing feature, and here’s what I got:
“person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated…
Brief update on the Beaver Brook tumblr theme in progress:
- I added photo captions, now they appear when you rollover an image.
- I want to submit it to the theme store, but Tumblr requires that themes support all post types (chat, audio, etc), which I haven’t had time (or interest, given this is photoblog) to build.
- Do you have a theme in the Tumblr store and are you interested to help me wrap this up? There seems to be a lot of folks who want to use this theme and I’d love to get it to them — you could help! MSG me.
Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp admits that one area the blogging network hasn’t performed well enough at thus far is content discovery – and you can expect to see a lot of development in that area at Tumblr.com this year.
Karp is at the DLD conference today as part of a bid to expand the international impact of the blogging service. As we reported earlier today, the startup now serves 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month.
We caught up with him a little later to find out more about what’s in store for 2012. A focus on growth outside the US and a larger staff headcount are planned but product development is also a priority, Karp says.
Search. Can’t wait for the day when I can better search not only the broader Tumblr communities, but also my own tags.
New Tumblr “Like” Feature
You can now “like” a post in your Tumblr Dashboard without having to reblog it. I “like” it.
Update: Apparently not everyone can see the heart button just yet. I imagine Tumblr is rolling this feature out now… be patient :)
Now testing: Share posts you’ve liked
You can enable the option on your Preferences page.
Tumblr Staff: SOPA Update
This weekend, we hosted a meeting at Tumblr HQ with top technology companies, politicians and advocacy groups to coordinate our effort to reform or prevent the well-intentioned but deeply flawed Stop Online Piracy Act from becoming law. You guys have already made a huge impact in Washington, but…
Call for Submissions: What’s Your Favorite Tumblr?
At TIME.com, we’re working on a guide to the best Tumblrs out there. But we want to know what you think first.
What Tumblr can’t you live without? (Aside from ours, of course.) Whether it’s news, photography, design or just cat videos, we want to know what you follow — and why.
Reply to this post (and include the URL) with your picks. We’ll mark popular suggestions as “Readers’ Choice” in our final list, which should come out by the end of January.
Why you might get tons of Tumblr likespam (and what to do about it)
A suggestion for Tumblr: Try to figure out a way so spammers can’t use this black-hat SEO (search engine optimization) technique. It’s dead simple to take advantage of, and as a result, some sites (such as our own) often drown in it. Today, for example, we got a ton of fake traffic from bots doing an obscure search on Google (see screenshots). Here’s a quick explanation as to what’s happening, as far as we can see:
- first Black hat SEO types hit Google and type in this specific phrase — “site:tumblr.com ‘liked this’” — a common phrase on Tumblr due to the way it handles likes.
- then Then, sketchy bot types will create hundreds or thousands of fake Tumblr accounts whose URLs forward to a sketchy-looking site not on Tumblr.
- result These sites end up getting hundreds or thousands of backlinks to their sketchy sites on Google — and all they had to do was like tons of people.
» But we have a temporary solution: Are you, like us, getting a lot of spam on your Tumblr? This is a likely reason. We’d like to offer a suggestion to solve the problem. If you know how to edit your theme in HTML, do a search for the phrase “{PostNotes}” and replace it with this: ”<!—googleoff: all—>{PostNotes}<!—googleon: all—>”. This prevents the notes from getting crawled by Google, which is good because it focuses your content, but bad, because any relevant content in reblogs won’t account for what shows up in search engines. This is really a problem Tumblr needs to look at — if they take out common phrases or make them invisible to search engines, everyone wins. But we hope this at least helps your sanity. It’ll help ours.
(Source: shortformblog)
