Tumblr is traditionally the home of fun and frivolous blogs: Moustair, Kim Jong-Ill Looking At Things, Missed High Fives, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, and the weird but wonderful Consume Consume (warning: you may lose an entire day in there).
But there are also some more thoughtful collections on Tumblr:
- Abondonedography documents the strangely hypnotic lure of abandoned man-made structures, as does Abandoned Playgrounds.
- Adiphany shows some of the cleverer pieces from the world of advertising.
- Histories Past is a collection of fascinating historical photographs.
- Found is also a collection of photographs, all of them from the archives of National Geographic, many of them hitherto-unpublished.
It’s going to be real shame when Tumblr shuts down and deletes all that content.
Of course that will never happen. Just like that never would’ve happened to Posterous or Pownce or Vox or GeoCities — publishing platforms where millions of people published a panoply of posts from the frivolous to the sublime, all of them now destroyed, their URLs purged from the web.
That reminds me: there’s one other Tumblr-hosted blog I came across recently: Our Incredible Journey documents those vile and disgusting announcements that start-ups make when they get acquired by a larger company, right before they flush their user’s content (and trust) down the toilet.
Oh, and I’ve got a Tumblr blog too. I just use it for silly pictures, YouTube videos, and quotes. I don’t want it to hurt too much when it gets destroyed.