By Kelly Faircloth 5/20 8:06am

Linkages

She's laughing at you, fandom. LAUGHING AT YOU.

Booting Up: Tumblr Users Are Freaking Out So Hard Right Now, You Guys

“The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on behavioral neuroscience.” [New York Times]

The tax man’s hanging round Apple’s door, and now Tim Cook is due to appear before Congress on the matter. [Telegraph]

For her science fair project, this teenaged girl invented a supercapacitor that could maybe, with further development, charge your electronics lightening fast. Everyone’s now feeling pretty bad about their baking soda volcano, huh? [Jezebel]

Matt Mullenweg says that talk of Yahoo buying Tumblr sent WordPress imports from Tumblr skyrocketing, from 400-600 posts per hour to 72,000 on Sunday. Of course, that could’ve just been one really dedicated porn reblogger. [AllThingsD]

Tumblr users are having a collective meltdown to rival The China Syndrome (only onetime Yahoo users are old enough to get that joke). [Buzzfeed]

By Patrick Clark 2/06 8:00am

Linkages

leadin

Booting Up: Sheryl Sandberg is Leaning in on Women, Work and Leadership

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once asked Sheryl Sandberg if she was a “pom-pom girl.” If Mr. O’Neill were alive today, the Facebook COO would tell him she’s “a pom-pom girl for feminism,” she writes in her forthcoming book.  [WSJ]

Talk about chutzpah. An Indian website plagiarized articles on medical research, then filed a DCMA request with WordPress to pull the originals down. [ArsTech nica]

Hewlett-Packard is planning on “taking full advantage” of Dell’s transition to a private company. [Deal Journal]

Somebody had to go and point out that zip, zero, not a single member of the billion-dollar startup club is based in New York. [Crain's New York Business]

Jon Stewart on Vine: “Every time there’s a human advancement, it is used almost immediately for porn.” [AllThingsD]

By Jessica Roy 11/16/12 8:56am

It's All About the Bitcoins

(Photo: Wordpress)

WordPress.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoin Payments

WordPress.com, which hosts close to 58 million blogs across the world, announced last night that it will now accept payments for upgrades via Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency. The blog hosting platform says its mission is to “make publishing democratic,” and because PayPal and other payment companies block access in a fair amount of countries, the company has decided to accept Bitcoin, enabling users without access to PayPal to still purchase WordPress upgrades. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 7/17/12 6:45pm

Revamping

Gorgeous friends not, to our knowledge, included. (Image courtesy of Squarespace.)

Squarespace Takes a Swing at WordPress and Tumblr with a Heartbreakingly Easy New Interface

Finally, officially out: Squarespace 6, a complete rework of the web design platform that’s been around since the olden days of 2003. The beta has been trucking along since last October, but today the company finally flipped the switch. The new platform is the culmination of two years of work, following a $38.5 million investment made by Index Ventures and Accel Partners back in 2010.

Included in the overhaul is practically everything but the kitchen sink. A brief summary, from today’s announcement: Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 9/21/11 11:54am

Blog Lords

wordpress

WordPress Must Like the Looks of Tumblr Because It Just Added a ‘Follow’ Button

There must be something in the water. First Facebook announced it would formalize its stalking function with a subscription feature. And today WordPress announced it will be adding a follow feature to give users another way to subscribe to a blog, in the hopes of driving traffic. It looks like Tumblr’s “follow” button only further down the page–and ends up in your inbox. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/14/11 2:31pm

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/)

Startup News: Tinyproj, Rolling.fm, Foursquare, New Work City and an Automattic Party

ROLLING ALONG. “We are excited to announce there has been over 1,000,000 friendships made on Rolling.FM since our launch a little over a month ago!  Our platform has definitely become the music AND social discovery platform,” writes cofounder Nhon Ma in an email. Rolling is launching more social features–like “buy a drink,” whereby which users will be able to buy old and new friends “drinks,” and the enhanced profile browser to “view others’ playlist, photos, etc.”

I LAUNCHED DIS. Meet Tinyproj, an experiment from the prolific Kyle Bragger. “Hello. Tinyproj connects talented developers, designers, illustrators, and copywriters with folks who need a hand with paid, short-term* projects.”

IGNITE IT AGAIN. “Ignite NYC’s on 10/10. We will be announcing speakers this week. We have a room of 1,600 to fill, the largest evaaarrr!” Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 6/17/11 12:28pm

Stop The Tumblrs

oranges

Tumblr, Age 4, Hosts as Many Blogs as WordPress, Age 8. Can We Stop Comparing Them Now?

Welp, Tumblr has caught up to WordPress, Mark Coatney said during an NPR interview yesterday. Tumblr has been hot on WordPress’s trail for a while; now both free blogging platforms host or power about 20 million blogs. “Tumblr now has about the same amount of bloggers as WordPress:  But which ones get more traffic? Guessing the latter,” tweeted social media wunderkind Vadim Lavrusik, formerly of Mashable, now media liaison for Facebook.

We say, who cares? We’re sick of hearing this comparison. Juxtaposing Tumblr and WordPress is like comparing Apple to oranges.com. Read More

By Ben Popper 5/23/11 9:27am

App Economy

texting

Textingly Seeds the Web With SMS Apps

In a smart expansion of its current offerings, local start-up Textingly, which helps businesses manage their SMS interactions with customers, is building out an app platform to integrate their services with some big web companies.

Users of the more than 18 million WordPress blogs, for example, can now add a Textingly widget to their Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 5/10/11 2:07pm

Tumblr

tumblr shades

WordPress Coming Up On 20 Million Blogs; Tumblr Not Far Behind

WordPress, which opened for business in 2005, is going great! It hosts 19.9 million blogs, according to Royal Pingdom, and has been millions ahead of Tumblr–but the gap is closing quickly. Tumblr now says it hosts 18.4 million blogs–they just hit 17 million a few weeks ago–and is growing at an alarming pace, hence all the downtime over the past year.

It’s arguable that WordPress and Tumblr are really competitors, since WordPress is a sophisticated content management system for publishers with an extensive library of probably thousands of plug-ins and themes to extend its functionality, while Tumblr is a minimalist rich media blogging platform of which the news feed and social features are a major attraction. WordPress is primarily front-facing; the backend is a mess of wires and code. Tumblr is bi-directional–a Tumblr that lives on a .com makes for a pretty website that you may not be able to tell is part of a socially-driven application, but much of the activity happens inside the network’s walls.