markcoatney:

steverubel:

Brent Simmons sees a natural evolution for blogs…

“New blogging systems like Posterous and Tumblr seem to be pretty popular, and they fill a nice middle ground: short content, easy sharing, social stuff. They’re cool.

But try to imagine replacing…

This is a great message and I think that it says a lot about Tumblr, but one thing that Tumblr should consider is that, as the traffic does go through the dashboard for many of these blogs, it does mean that traffic isn’t as easy of a metric to go by for many of these blogs. A good example of this: SFB is amongst the top 500 blogs on Technorati, which is kind of cool, and I only know of a few other Tumblrs with a metric that high.

However, this doesn’t translate to traffic in the traditional sense, but instead influence, as people read the blog on the Tumblr dashboard. Tumblr is cool, but if you’re trying to build a business from it, you can’t run ads against your content for regular readers, because they generally read from the dashboard, which makes for a tougher uphill climb. So the long-term question is, how does Tumblr let blogs monetize their work via the dashboard, so they can build a business around their cool idea? If they figure that out, they win.