Tumblr user feels like taking a jump

Tumblr user wants cash

One feels like jumping into a deep hole out of frustration at the deal while another wants a share of the money because the content on Tumblr is produced by the users.

The colourful posts and animated GIFs with which Tumblr users are reacting to the deal show how different the new media is from the old media.

This was not how people reacted when AOL merged with Time Warner in the year 2000 or when Reuters merged with Thomson in 2008. This form of reaction was simply not feasible at the time. The Tumblr-kind of animated GIFs really post-dates the microblogging platform, which sprang to life only in 2007.

In just six years, Tumblr has risen from scratch to a billion-dollar property. Not that it would have been worth a billion dollars unless Yahoo was so desperate for it.  Yahoo is paying a premium for Tumblr, which reportedly had a market valuation of $800 million.

Media companies are willing to pay a fortune for the posts, snapshots and videos of Joe Bloggs and his friends if the stuff can keep others entertained. That’s what this deal tells us. Crowd-sourced content or peer-to-peer entertainment has become big business. My little blog on its own may not be worth anything. But if I have one on Tumblr, that along with the rest is worth $1.1 billion to Yahoo.

Tumblr’s 26-year-old founder David Karp can laugh all the way to the bank. He is reported to own at least 25 per cent of Tumblr.

He is being rewarded for his patience. Tumblr has not been much of a money-maker, it is said, but maybe that’s because he has been keener on attracting more users than advertisers. In this respect, he has been like Mark Zuckerberg, three years his senior, who focused on building Facebook first before going for the big money.

I remember Tumblr in its early days. When it just had a couple of themes and what made it so darn attractive was the ease with which one could post videos. I remember posting Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Beatles videos on Tumblr.

Tumblr used to be compared with Posterous back then. Now Posterous has been swallowed up by Twitter while Tumblr – and this is important – will remain independent with Karp still in charge.

Tumblr has grown spectacularly in the last year. The Wall Street Journal reports:

New York-based Tumblr, founded in 2007, has 175 employees, more than 108 million blogs and, according to comScore Inc., had nearly 117 million unique users world-wide in March. That is up from around 58 million a year ago.

Tumblr may be small compared with Facebook, which has more than a billion users. But that makes Tumblr’s billion-dollar price all the more significant. Facebook is first and foremost a social network where people may write posts but are more likely to post photos and updates. Tumblr is primarily a microblogging platform where people post content – photos, GIFs, blog posts.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for content that ranges from animated cartoons to expletive-ridden outbursts that will never appear in a newspaper. There’s been a sea change in the media business.

The Tumblr user who would like a share of the money is not making an unprecedented demand. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier writes in his book Who Owns the Future:

Pay people for information gleaned from them if that information turns out to be valuable. If observation of you yields data that makes a robot seem like a natural conversationalist, or for a political campaign to target voters for its message, then you ought to be owed money for the use of that valuable data.

Yahoo is paying for content generated by Tumblr users, though of course they had to use Tumblr to publish that content.

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Remember GeoCities, an online community like Tumblr? Founded in 1994, GeoCities was the third most visited site on the World Wide Web by 1999 when it was bought by Yahoo for $3.57 billion in stock, according to Wikipedia. You could build your own website for free on GeoCities. But it became less popular after Blogger, WordPress and other blogging tools and social networks were launched. Yahoo closed down GeoCities in 2009. Now GeoCities is available only in Japan.

GeoCities was not the only online community dumped by Yahoo.

Remember Yahoo! 360°? That was a social networking and personal communication portal made available by Yahoo in 2005. But Yahoo stopped developing it in 2008, according to Wikipedia.

Flickr, acquired within a year of its birth by Yahoo in 2005, has had better luck. It is as popular as ever and gaining new users, according to Wikipedia. But it’s a photo-hosting service and not faced the same kind of competition as GeoCities and Yahoo! 360°, which had to contend with the likes of Blogger, MySpace and WordPress.

Misgivings are being expressed on Tumblr about a deal with Yahoo. “Yahoo will ruin Tumblr just like it ruins everything else,” commented one Tumblr user.

Yahoo is not the only big company which has had problems running online communities. NewsCorp acquired MySpace only to sell it off after it was overtaken by Facebook.

Tumblr CEO and co-founder David Karp, 26, is close to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, 29, wrote Om Malik on Giga Om, speculating on the possibility of a last-minute Facebook-Tumblr deal.

But Facebook is not really a better fit for Tumblr. Freewheeling Tumblr, where one can have more than one account, is more like Reddit, in my personal opinion. Facebook is more like LinkedIn.

Tumblr should stay independent, wrote one Tumblr user, unhappy about any deal with Facebook or Yahoo.

Yahoo’s reported $1.1 billion deal will be paying a premium for Tumblr, which has a reported valuation of $800 million, according to All Things D.

But a website’s worth only as much as its traffic. GeoCities wilted under Yahoo. Let’s hope Tumblr has better luck. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. It has flourished for the same reason as GeoCities, by making it easy for users to post and publish what they like. That has never been Yahoo’s cup of tea. Yahoo is not known for user-generated content apart from the photos on Flickr.

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Addison

Did blogs come first or newspapers? The Daily Courant, first published in 1702, was the first British daily newspaper, we are told. It was a one-page newspaper, with advertisements on the reverse side, according to Wikipedia. Better known by far, however, are the periodical Tatler (1709-1711) and the daily Spectator (1711-1712) founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele – and what they wrote were essays.

Dr Samuel Johnson continued that tradition, writing essays which appeared in the periodical, The Rambler (1750-1752). He even wrote about not wanting to write. This essay, which appeared in The Rambler, begins almost like an entry in a personal blog:

I sat yesterday morning employed in deliberating on which, among the various subjects that occurred to my imagination, I should bestow the paper of today. After a short effort of meditation by which nothing was determined, I grew every moment more irresolute, my ideas wandered from the first intention, and I rather wished to think, than thought upon any settled subject; till at last I was awakened from this dream of study by a summons from the press: the time was come for which I had been thus negligently purposing to provide, and, however dubious or sluggish, I was now necessitated to write.

The Spectator could be just as personal. Here is Addison writing in The Spectator:

When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another: the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind

(Reflections in Westminster Abbey)

Dr Johnson

He had a wide readership. Wikipedia says: “Despite a modest daily circulation of approximately 3,000 copies, The Spectator was widely read; Joseph Addison estimated that each number was read by 60,000 Londoners, about a tenth of the capital’s population at the time.”

Readership could be much higher than circulation because people read these journals in coffee houses.

Now we expect hard news from daily newspapers. But there was a time when a publication could come out twice or thrice a week, or even every day like The Spectator, with a marked literary flavour.

I was reminded of that by an article in PaidContent, which says the present-day mass media with its focus on hard news and celebrities is a “blip in history”. Media has always been personal and social, it says. As recently as the late 19^th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, it says.

So personal blogs have a long history, only the medium has changed.

True, bloggers are not expected to range from literature to morality like Addison and Johnson did.

Bloggers have to be much more focused, concentrating on a particular niche – food, lifestyle, entertainment – because readers and search engines alike want everything indexed and categorized. They can’t be Lifehacker one day and Mashable the next.

But when they muse, reminisce, rave and rant, they are striking a personal vein that has a long history in journalism.

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There was a time when it meant an arsenal, an armoury, a storehouse for arms and ammunition. Maybe that is how the cartridge-holder for rifles and machine-guns came to be called a “magazine”.

But what is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear of a “magazine”? A periodical publication.

The word makes you think of pictures and articles rather than lethal weapons.

Not that it had anything to do with weapons at first.

“Magazine” was originally an Arabic word which simply meant a “storehouse”.

From Arabic the word passed into Italian and French and then into English, acquiring new meanings along the way.

Its evolution impressed the outgoing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, John Simpson, who has studied thousands of words.

It seems such a common, everyday word. But lexicographers like Simpson go deep into usage and history, seeing words in a different light.

He says:

Each word is a different sort of poem. The smaller entries are like Shakespearean sonnets — the larger ones, more like Joyce’s Ulysses. What we’re going to realize more and more, as we work with the dictionary on the computer, is that we’re not really looking at individual words. Individual words are just part of the mosaic of language. With the networks we’re able to build up, you’re able to see the connection much more clearly than you could in the old days.

Simpson, 59, will be retiring as chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in October. He has seen dictionaries go from print to digital and speaks of the enormous difference computers have made to lexicographers like him.

Time recalls:

John Simpson began working at OED in 1976. The young index-card-shuffling assistant demonstrated a real way with words: in 1993, he was named Chief Editor—only the seventh in the dictionary’s long and storied history.

The Oxford English Dictionary has changed under Simpson. It has become an online subscription service. He says: “We had a prototype of the OED online in the 1990s. It was one of the first few hundred websites of its kind. And from that, we managed to argue with the Oxford University Press that we should go public online [in 2000]. At the time, it was pretty innovative.”

Time asked him, “How different is your job different from your predecessors?”

He replied, “What’s changed is the accessibility of information about language. Nowadays, when we’re working on a word like American or European, you’re going to have far too much material. You’ll be able to instantly find twenty-thousand 17th-century examples. And you just can’t read them all. So you have to select and sort and be practical in a different way.”

The Third Edition of the OED he has been working on is very different from the earlier editions, he added.

When we set the project up in the 1990s, we had to settle what the editorial policy was. We wanted to make things much more approachable than they were in the Victorian period, when they were at the mercy of the print culture, making everything as cryptic and abbreviated as possible so they could get more information on the page … We wanted to cite from sources that weren’t just the canonical texts [such as Dickens and Shakespeare], but much more social documents, diaries and journals. We were trying to open up the dictionary. We also wanted to continue the tradition of asking people in the real world to contribute.

Time asked, “How many people are working on the project at OED?”

Simpson replied, “We’ve got about 70 editors, about 10 of them work on the word origins—the old Germanic and French origins of words, and so on. And about 10 of them work on new words. Another large set work on revising the 20 volumes of the text of the existing dictionary. We’re revising that into, if it were printed, close to 40 volumes. Those staff are divided into generalists and scientists.”

Time asked, “Are there particular words that stick in your mind that have been interesting to revamp? “

That’s when he mentioned the word, “magazine”.

Simpson said, “One of the earliest ones we worked on was the entry for magazine. It was originally an Arabic word meaning storehouse. The earliest usage in English, around the time of the Spanish Armada, referred to military storehouses. Gradually people started to think of what else you keep—like a storehouse of information. And it transferred into books and the magazines we know now. You can still see the original meaning somewhere in the background.”

And then came another interesting fact.

Editors working on dictionaries don’t start with the letter A, he said.

Time asked with which letter he started his revision of the OED.

Simpson said, “We didn’t start at A because nobody in their right minds starts at A. You should steer clear of vowels until you know what you’re doing—a’s and o’s are interchangeable in some contexts. It causes all sorts of problems. You’re much better off starting with a consonant. We thought M was a reasonable short letter. So we went from M to R. Now we have a system of looking at important clusters of words, because we think those are the ones that people are most likely to look up. We worked on blue, for example. We’d already worked on black and red. These are big entries because people are very familiar with colour, so they use them in lots of expressions.”

But how do words get into dictionaries? That’s what Time wanted to know. “What does it take for a new word to be included? “

Simpson replied, “We’re really looking for nothing other than widespread currency, either in a general use, or in a particular specialist area or geographical area. … The people who were brought up on the old linear tradition find it really quite disturbing that the dictionary can actually change from three months to the next. But from our point of view, it’s important to have the dictionary as up-to-date as you can. I’m quite proud of the amount of change from quarter to quarter.”

So now the OED has become more like a quarterly publication instead of a traditional dictionary, which used to take years to update.

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For that is what “tawdry” means: cheap, showy, tacky. And yet the word comes from the name of a saint. It is a corruption of “St Audrey”.

No disrespect was meant to the saint. It was used to describe the laces sold at St Audrey’s fair. They were called “tawdry lace” and must have been showy or cheap.

I have never heard of “tawdry lace” before but came across the phrase when I looked up the etymology, origin, of the word, ”tawdry”. It’s short for “tawdry lace” and subsequently came to mean “cheap” and “showy”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It can also mean “vulgar” and “tacky” (Collins) and “ignoble” (Merriam-Webster).

From what I just read, St Audrey was anything but cheap or vulgar. But the high-born princess Etheldrida, who later became St Audrey, loved to dress up in her youth – and came to regret it later.

“St Audrey died of a tumour in her throat, which she considered to be a just retribution, because in her youth she had for vain show adorned her neck with manifold splendid necklaces.” That’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says citing the Anglo-Saxon monks, the Venerable Bede and Aelfric.

St Audrey, who lived in the seventh century, was one of the four saintly daughters of Anna, the king of East Anglia.

She took a vow of perpetual chastity and, though married twice, she remained a virgin. She is the patron saint of Ely, where St Audrey’s fair was held, and those infamous “tawdry laces” were sold.

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When Jesus heals a child, his disciples ask him why they could not cure the boy. Because they lacked faith, He tells them, faith can move mountains. Here is the passage from the King James Version:

17:14 And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying, 17:15 Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.

17:16 And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.

17:17 Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

17:18 And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.

17:19 Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?

17:20 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

Can faith move mountains? I don’t know, but that’s what Jesus says. And it is repeated ad infinitum by people who stress the importance of positive thinking, the power of affirmation, creative visualization and the law of attraction.

The law of life is the law of belief. A belief is a thought in your mind. Do not believe in things to harm or hurt you. Believe in the power of your subconscious to heal, inspire, strengthen, and prosper you. According to your belief is it done unto you.

That is what Joseph Murphy says in his book, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. He also refers to the Book of Matthew and how Jesus restored the vision of two blind men who had faith in Him.

9:27 And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him, crying, and saying, Thou son of David, have mercy on us.

9:28 And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.

9:29 Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you.

So there is a connection between religion and positive thinking. Both require faith.

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What’s more, they can add articles, pictures and videos to their Flipboard magazines straight from the desktop using a new Flipboard bookmarklet called Flip it.

You can also add to your magazine by pressing the plus + sign you will see on pictures and articles when you have your Flipboard open on your smartphone or tablet.

You can create more than one magazine and see them on your smartphone, tablet or by logging in to a new website:  https://editor.flipboard.com. And you can email your magazine to others or share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Flipboard.

Here’s the magazine I compiled. This is how it looks like on the desktop.

Flipboard magazine on desktop

And here’s how it looks on a tablet.

Flipboard magazine on tablet

If you have been using the Pocket bookmarklet to save articles for later reading, you will notice the similarity – the desktop version of the Flipboard magazine does look like the Pocket “queue”.

You can use Pocket on your desktop, tablet and your smartphone. So why use the Flipboard bookmarklet, Flip it?

Because that adds articles from the web to your Flipboard magazine. Then you don’t have to open Pocket to see the articles you have saved. Instead you can check Flipboard for new content along with the articles saved.

Pocket, however, has one advantage. You can tag the articles. On Flipboard, you can add captions. Tags are useful for searching.

Flipboard was originally created for the iPad. Now half the users are on Android and it is phenomenally popular. TechCrunch says:

Since the launch of personalized magazines this March, social magazine maker Flipboard has added 6 million new users to its platform, bringing its total number of users to 56 million – and that’s before the feature even arrived on Android, which now comprises roughly half of Flipboard’s user base.

This video shows how to create your own Flipboard magazine.

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Andrea del Sarto

Poor Andrea del Sarto. A successful Italian painter who was overshadowed by his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. We admire the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael while Andrea del Sarto is almost forgotten.  Yet that is what makes him more like most of us.

We may not be remembered outside our own circle of family and friends, but that does not take the edge off the desire and zeal with which you pursue your dreams and aspirations. We may not always get what we want, and we may want more if we do, but that is life. A constant yearning.

You may be asked to be practical and realistic, but can you give up all your desires? Can you imagine what life would be like if you abandoned all your dreams and aspirations?

It is all right to have high hopes even if they end in disappointment because one can’t live without hope.

That is what Robert Browning seems to be saying in his poem, Andrea del Sarto, a dramatic monologue where the painter in his old age is speaking to his beautiful, young, faithless wife. He says:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

He tells his wife, Lucrezia, who also serves as his model, “We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!”  It’s a clear admission of defeat, but he adds:

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.
Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

He consoles himself with what he has.

Unlike him, Raphael and Michelangelo don’t have a beautiful wife, he says, even though he knows she has a lover. The poem ends with him asking his wife to go and see her lover, who is waiting for her  outside their house:

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my Love.

It is a poem about an old man trying to come to terms with life, but for all his disappointments and his acceptance of his wife’s infidelity, he has not entirely given up hope.  For just before telling his wife to go and see her lover, he talks of heaven.

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance–
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover…

In heaven, perhaps, he will get a second chance, he says, and work alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo.

It is a tender, wistful poem about an old man who is knowing but still hoping against hope.

I love this poem , especially because of those two lines:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

That striving, that desire, is so human.

Browning’s poems may not be as widely read as they used to be.  But, at his best, he speaks for us memorably, eloquently. I love The Last Ride Together. It is one of the most romantic poems in the English language.

What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,—
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?

Life is a constant yearning. Browning described that emotion with such passion and romance.

Born 200 years ago, Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889) at his best is unforgettable.

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There is a connection between Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Sherlock Holmes, Wooster and Jeeves and Lord Emsworth. Their authors once all played cricket together.

Barrie bowling a left-hander in 1922

Sir James Barrie gathered the famous authors of his day to play on his amateur team, the Allahakbarries. The players included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, EW Hornung, EV Lucas and Jerome K Jerome. They called themselves Allahakbarries in the mistaken belief that “Allah akbar” meant “Heaven help us” in Arabic (rather than “God is great”). The team played cricket together from the 1890s till 1913, before the First World War.

The Writer’s Almanac has some interesting anecdotes about Barrie. It says:

Once Barrie went to a dinner party with the poet and scholar AE Housman, whom he had wanted to meet for a long time, but he was so shy that he couldn’t talk to him. He wrote him a letter afterward that said: “Dear Professor Houseman, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, J.M. Barrie.” Housman wrote back: “Dear Sir James Barrie, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, A.E. Housman. P.S. And now you’ve made it worse for you have spelt my name wrong.”

The Writer’s Almanac adds:

In 1929, Britain’s most famous children’s hospital, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, asked Barrie to give a series of lectures. But he was too shy to speak in public. Instead, he offered to donate all the royalties from Peter Pan to the hospital.

So that’s why the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony included this sequence showing flying nannies and kids dancing on beds in a scene that looked like a cross between Mary Poppins and Peter Pan. It was a tribute to children’s literature and the National Health Service.

The hospital still gets royalties from anything to do with Peter Pan in Britain, says The Writer’s Almanac.

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The National University of Singapore (NUS) ranks eighth in computer science,  fourth in communication and media studies – only one place behind Columbia University – and shares 10^th place with Berkeley in politics and international studies  in the 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject. In English language and literature, NUS ranks 14^th.

NUS is also 14^th in economics – just behind Oxford,  UPenn and New York University but ahead of UCLA  and Northwestern — 20^th in medicine and 22^nd in law.

Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is 22^nd in computer science and 11^th in communication and media studies, ahead of MIT and New York University.

The rankings, according to QS, are based on academics, feedback from employers, citations and what it calls an H-index which attempts to measure the productivity and impact of the published work of a scholar.

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