Tech Watch: Introduction to Tumblr

Blogging has been around since the late 90's, but a new form, microblogging, is quickly taking hold of the Internet world. Rather than long-winded posts (not too much unlike my own), microbloggers post small bits of information - maybe a quote, picture, video, or link. Because of the ease in microblogging, a picture can spread to millions of people in a matter of seconds.

Tumblr, the most popular microblogging service, hosts over 33 million blogs and twelve billion posts. Unlike Twitter, Tumblr is designed to better deal with the millions of images posted on its website each day. Over half of Tumblr's posts are images whereas Twitter is mostly text-based.

So why is all of this important to you? Find out after the jump.

In addition to Tumblr's regular blog view, each
account can be viewed in "archive" view where
posts can be easily skimmed for content.

In October, a story broke about a 14-year-old girl who had been videoed performing a sexual act on her boyfriend. The video - child pornography - was quickly posted on YouTube and shared throughout Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

The significance of Tumblr is its sharing feature. With the touch of a button, an image from one Tumblr account can be reblogged to another, and soon it has spread like wildfire. Thus, there is certainly the concern raised from a "sexting" photo that finds its way to the Internet, but that isn't the only worry in the minds of law enforcement.

Because of the ease and relative anonymity in setting up a Tumblr account, it would be easy to create an entire microblog where images or updates related to CP could be stored. Certainly Tumblr will try to remove such accounts, but their 56 employees will be hard-pressed to constantly watch 33 million blogs and growing.

Even without that, however, Tumblr has quickly become filled with pornography. And unlike other services's actions like classifying blogs as pornographic and requiring a click-through (like Blogger), Tumblr users can willingly and easily share their porn with everyone - including children.

Tumblr does have a policy stating, "Sexually Explicit Video. Accounts that use Tumblr’s Video Upload feature to regularly upload and host sexually explicit or pornographic material will be suspended." That does not mean they do not allow posts containing pornography, but simply that they do not want the videos hosted on their servers. Linking in a video from another website is entirely okay.