Bijan Sabet, partner at Spark Capital and one of the lead investors in Tumblr, today on his tumblog:

“i gotta talk to @davidkarp about this. if i’m reading this correctly, it looks like Tumblr is *growing* by 200M page views per week.”

You’ll be hard pressed to find him talking too much about their downtime.

And again (because I feel as though this post could come across the wrong way), I’m willing to bet all of the money in my pockets that the Tumblr team is doing everything they can to keep their service up and running – I just think they and their investors should be talking about it more. They should be talking about how they’re pulling out all of the stops, pushing all of their resources and people at the problem, their successes and failures in that area. Simply ignoring the subject and constantly trying to talk only about the good things that are going on smells like propaganda and spin. And I seriously doubt that is intentional but that is the way it smells from here.

Note to self: Learn from this.

That is what happened at Viddler when we didn’t realize we had incorrectly setup our robots.txt file, making Viddler bad for SEO, and we were called out on it. Whether or not you know what a robots.txt file is or not doesn’t really matter. The point was we held this particular issue in pretty high regard and yet – somehow – we missed it.

Once we found out that we had missed this we immediately went to work on fixing it. It is OK to miss things now and then – everyone does, everyone will, I will, you will – but it is what you do when you find out that matters.

Viddler is great for SEO. It is great in every way that we can make it great for our customers. And we’re going to strive to keep it that way.

My very good friend Gary Vaynerchuk recently gave a talk in New York City at #140conf, which is a essentially a conference about Twitter, dealing with scaling caring.

I’ve seen many of his talks and keynotes and this was one of the more focused and meaningful in recent memory. He touches on the fact that caring about your product, brand, business, and the community that you’re trying to build around such things is, indeed, hard work. There’s no silver bullet and yes you have to put in some long hours if you really, really care.

That, and he’s trying not to curse now which is something I’ve been trying to get him to stop doing during his talks for years but now that he’s got a little baby girl (who is as cute as a button) he’s making a real effort.

Money quote: “I’m the greatest contradiction of all time.” – @garyvee

Oh, and a few hours later he had some fun on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Scoble’s argument is that companies doing really great things in Israel may, or may not be, getting the same type of PR that companies in Silicon Valley are.

I’d argue that you don’t have to run your company on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea in order to see the same effect.  We at Viddler, in my opinion, are doing some really great things, have big plans, and are doing it for far less than our competition.  However we seldom receive any “press” related to some of the moves we’re making.  One could easily argue that this is a good thing and that we can publicly operate in relative stealth mode – but sometimes it hurts more than it helps.

As a for instance: If I was the Technology Evangelist for a video-sharing site based out of Silicon Valley – do you think my post about what Flickr video means to the rest of the industry would have gone relatively unnoticed by the online press?  I doubt it.  Do I think my post should have gone unnoticed? Yes.  Because I didn’t say anything that any one else wasn’t already thinking.  Sometimes the weight of the words written by those in Silicon Valley are held in too high regard, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to us either.

At the end of the day, I believe Viddler can be successful with or without the PR that is generated mainly by “buzz”.  Buzz may indeed help to spread your message (hopefully the right one) but it definitely not a key to sustainability.  Sustainability comes from building a valuable product or service, wisdom in the marketplace, execution of vision, and “picking the low-hanging fruit” instead of leaving it behind.  If you don’t do that, it wouldn’t matter how many posts Mike Arrington writes about your company.