September 12th, 2012
David Karp, founder of the one of the most popular services of all time, Tumblr:
Takes thirty employees out to dinner. Gets carded while ordering a beer.
Happens to me all the time David. All the time. And I’ll be 32 in a few short weeks.
June 18th, 2012
A jQuery framework for ajax loading post content via Tumblr’s v2 API and rendering it in your document using customisable JsRender templates. See the demo.
Interesting. Works well and is a pretty great framework already.
April 17th, 2012
Quick, everyone run over to Google and search for blog before this happens.
April 7th, 2012
Jason Kottke recently redesigned his site. His analysis is interesting to read for anyone who has done the same for their site. Here is what he said on attempting to make his site’s Twitter stream a little more engaging.
One of the small changes I made was to stop using post titles for posting to Twitter. I had hoped that using more descriptive text would make the tweets more easily retweetable…look at this tweet for example and compare to the title of the post it links to. This hasn’t really happened, which is surprising and disappointing.
And, this about Tumblr.
That big Tumblr increase was due to kottke.org’s new Tumblr blog. Having kottke.org posts be properly rebloggable is paying off. In addition, it’s got over 800 followers that are reading along in the dashboard. I’d like to see that number increase, but I’d probably need to engage a bit more on Tumblr for that to happen.
I don’t know what Jason is trying to gain by having a Tumblr blog for Kottke.org – besides the same benefits of having a Twitter stream or RSS feed – but as most of you probably know I gave up on getting engagement on Tumblr.
For the most part the Tumblr crowd seems a click-happy bunch. If they can’t click a single button to engage (like, retweet) they won’t do much else. So long as you can figure out a model that works within those constraints I suppose it could end up paying off.
March 25th, 2012
Tumblr, in their recently-updated Terms of Service that all logged in users are being asked to agree to.
You have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We’re serious: it’s a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you’re 12.9 years old. If you’re younger than 13, don’t use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.
I’d add, if you’re less than 13, try going outside. But this is good.
March 16th, 2012
This is a subject that is near and dear to me. It is a bit cliché to say this but I’ve been blogging since before it was a common verb. I’ve watched, very closely, as the blogging world has evolved over the last decade and even took some small part in that evolution.
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.
In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.
Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.
Meg Hourihan on ownership:
But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.
While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.
And that’s where Anil nails it.
So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.
I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.
In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?
Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.
I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.
So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.
The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:
I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.
Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.
I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?
Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.
One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.
Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.
Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.
Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.
I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.
May 16th, 2011
The recent chatter about pagination on blog home pages has reminded me of the days when blogging was just getting underway. Back then there were a few pioneers that were testing the waters, experimenting with the designs and layouts of their sites, constantly trying to find the right set of features that a blog needed.
And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.
I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.
Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.
Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.
Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.
Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.
Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.
Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.
Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.
Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.
Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.
I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.
March 1st, 2011
The success of The Watercolor Gallery thus far has been extremely gratifying. I really enjoy the effort it takes (and believe me it is an effort) to find art to feature, to dig for the details of a painting or an artist online, and to describe what inspires me about it. And so far that effort has really paid dividends for me and my art.
Since the few enormous inflection points a few months ago (such as being featured on Tumblr’s official Tumblr Tuesday) growth of the gallery’s audience has ceased. A few more Tumblr followers trickle in each week, a few more people “Like” the gallery on Facebook, and follow @h2ocolor on Twitter – but it appears that the same number of people that come in also walk back out of the door. This could easily be because, like Twitter, a huge number of accounts on Tumblr are spam or bots or junk accounts and they will, inevitably go inactive or be deleted. But I can’t be sure of that so I’ll just have to assume that a Tumblr follow is about as loyal a connection as reused, wet tape.
I try not to focus too much on statistics but also engagement. For me the best way to know if people are finding the gallery useful or enjoyable is how they interact and use the information on the site. For the most part, every single painting that gets featured on the gallery gets some sort of attention from the audience on Tumblr. Tumblr allows people to quickly “like” or to “reblog” a post to their own blogs. The viral nature of these two features make growing a new site fairly quick and easy. But it also creates, what would seem to be, a false sense of the level of engagement from the community.
It is so easy to like and reblog posts that anything above and beyond those two interactions is seemingly difficult to get from the Tumblr audience. Perhaps they are spoiled (and I mean this in a nice way) and they don’t need to do any more than that. If it takes more than a few seconds to decide what they are going do with a post they simply will move onto the next one. And believe me, there is a ‘next one’ waiting.
Tumblr’s staggering growth is fairly well known at this point. The amount of content flooding into the system, especially for those that follow dozens or hundreds of Tumblr-powered sites, must be completely overwhelming. A quick reload of one’s Tumblr Dashboard would probably reveal 10 new posts every few minutes or even seconds. Scrolling through that list and quickly clicking like or reblog has probably become a habit for many Tumblr addicts. As an example of this; for about three months straight a single Tumblr account was liking every single one of The Watercolor Gallery’s posts almost immediately after the post was published. My guess is that this person was wholly addicted to Tumblr’s Dashboard and sat on the site for the better part of the day clicking “like” on anything that rushed passed their nose. I can’t know for sure, but the patterns that I’ve seen – like the one described, certainly lend themselves to the idea that the Tumblr audience is chocked full of happy clickers.
A good example of this is the Artist Interview series on the site. By far the hardest posts to craft are the interviews of these artists. These posts are also the least liked and reblogged. I’d also wager that 90% of the people that follow the gallery on Tumblr don’t even read the interviews. Far more traffic comes from the artist linking to the interview and Google than it does from the Tumblr Dashboard. Obviously, one can’t be sure of what is read and not read on the Dashboard – since there are no stats for that – but if someone took the time to read the entire interview I’d have to assume they’d take the time to click “like”. I don’t think it is that the interviews aren’t good or that they aren’t valuable. As a watercolorist myself I find them extremely valuable and I’m sure that most other watercolorists would too (if not simply interesting or entertaining). I think the Tumblr audience simply skips the interviews on their Dashboard and move onto the next photo/video/easily-digestable post.
If I would have started with a WordPress-powered blog it is doubtful The Watercolor Gallery would have seen the amazingly quick growth that it did. However, would the growth have continued? Would the engagement with the community been greater? I don’t know. I don’t regret my decision to use Tumblr to power the gallery and it is a decision that I’m going to stick with for the foreseeable future. I just hope to put in some effort into growing the gallery’s audience even more and gaining a loyal, active audience that will appreciate everything the gallery offers.
January 30th, 2011
I know, my blog is turning into a Tumblr-a-thon. But I’ve done this before when I used to talk about Brightkite, Ma.gnolia, WordPress, Twitter and other services that I become attached to and care about. This is my blog and I can cry if I want to.
Here is how David Karp, founder of Tumblr, recently commented on Tumblr’s downtime to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfield.
“Karp admits that the company was “unprepared” for that kind of hockey-stick hypergrowth, but with a new $30 million round in the bank, he says his team is working round the clock to keep scaling and catching up with all the sudden demand. Karp says the growth is coming in part from college students, who really took to the service only since September, 2009 or so and, more recently, international growth in Europe, Japan,and Brazil. He also tells me separately that 65 percent of those pageviews come from Tumblr users looking at their Dashboards (which shows the stream of posts from other people on Tumblr they follow).”
Good.
Also I just found this post on Karp’s blog that has this interesting bit.
“Ah, yes – an incredible opportunity and challenge!
The really impressive piece is that our engineers have been keeping up with this surge in traffic while serving fewer and fewer errors every week. It’s been a rough couple of months, but we’re almost there.”
“Opportunity and challenge” is the perfect way to put it. Karp gets it. Now if only Tumblr assigned someone on the staff to do updates and share stats on these “fewer errors every week” via the main Staff blog? Oh wait, they already did.
Tumblr did a 180. Congrats.
January 27th, 2011
Given my recent spat on Tumblr about their downtime and the messaging coming from their team and investors, I thought this quote by Jason Fried of 37Signals in INC. was apropos:
“Of course, all companies experience episodes like this. How they handle the situation is what counts. I’m not talking about fixing the problem—you have to fix it; that’s a given. I’m talking about how you communicate with your customers, how you accept responsibility, and how you make things right. That’s what people remember.”
Jason was talking about Campfire in this article, a paid service, used by companies to communicate remotely and is a vital part of their workflow in many cases. Arguably Tumblr isn’t such a service and is, for the most part, free to use. So does this quote apply? I leave that to you to decide.
January 26th, 2011
I’ve already said all I’ve wanted to say about why I don’t think Tumblr’s team and investors should be focused solely on traffic. But, it appears they still are.
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.
January 5th, 2011
How quickly things change! I’ve been praising Tumblr over the last several months because it has been an excellent tool to build The Watercolor Gallery with. And it still is, except since I began building The Watercolor Gallery Tumblr has been, well, tumbling down in the minds and hearts of some of their core users.
I even called Zach Inglis out for his tirade against the Tumblr team. Now I’m thinking, perhaps, he was completely justified. Or, maybe, I spoke too soon. However, I also believe that the Tumblr team (or perhaps just the investors) and its core users want two very different things for Tumblr.
One of Tumblr’s main investors and mentors has been Union Square Ventures. USV is an incredibly adept team of venture capitalists who, for the most part, have made some excellent bets over the years and whose opinions I respect. Put simply, guys like Fred Wilson “get it” without even breaking a sweat. Well, at least he makes it look easy. That being said USV obviously cares very much about the success of Tumblr – I just believe it is a different type of success then what the core users want. Investors, by and large, want to see growth and eventually profitability while core users want stability and for things to work better and better over time for them.
In early 2010 USV reupped their bet on Tumblr by “doubling down” on them. They’ve put a cool $10m into Tumblr alone. Wilson, in his post in April 2010 about how Tumblr had gotten to 1bn pageviews per month, wrote a very short reason why they’ve made that bet.
“There are some lessons here. First, make your software super easy to use. Second, you don’t need hundreds of employees to build a big time web service. You can keep it lean and scale if you have the right team. That’s how Tumblr got to a billion page views and we just made a bet that they will be able to take that number a lot higher.“
Emphasis mine. USV thinks that Tumblr can increase the number of pageviews from 1bn per month to, well, a lot more. And they think that will help their investment. They don’t care, too much, about how the service gets there just that they increase that number dramatically and – I can only assume – get a much larger round of financing or exit.
I’m not saying that USV doesn’t care if Tumblr gets their downtime in check. You can’t serve 1bn+ pageviews per month if you’re down. I think USV cares very much about the stability of the Tumblr platform – I just think they are focused on the wrong thing which could end up trickling down to the Tumblr team. If the Tumblr team is focused on metrics they will end up losing what made Tumblr’s team so great to begin with – the passion for making something great, simple, and different from everything else out there.
I could be dead wrong. Perhaps the team at Tumblr is focused on exactly that and that the dreams of the investors don’t trickle down too far. I hope USV (and the rest of the investors in Tumblr) understand very well how to stay out of the hair of the core team so that they can continue to do what they are great at. But there must be some reason by Marco Arment (one of the 2-man-team that made Tumblr great to begin with) left to do his own thing and continuously touts that he doesn’t want to take investment for Instapaper. Is he jaded? Has the Tumblr team “sold out”? We’ll see.
Oh, and I’m not picking on Fred Wilson either. I would point to other Tumblr investors that have commented about the growth of Tumblr, like Bijan Sabet, but he powers his blog with Tumblr which means his search simply doesn’t work. Maybe he’s hoping that the millions of dollars that his company Spark Capital has invested in Tumblr will fix that?
Again, I hope I’m wrong and I want Tumblr to succeed. I love the service and would pay money to keep it up and stable. Lets hope someday they give all of us the opportunity to do just that.
December 14th, 2010
With Tumblr’s recent downtime I thought it’d be very important to back up The Watercolor Gallery to my computer. I also thought it’d be good to back it up to my Dropbox account.
It turns out this is very easy. Simply use the Tumblr Backup application (currently only available for Mac OS X) and point it to save to your Dropbox folder on your computer. Done.
Now I’ll set up a reminder to do this once a month and I’m all set.
December 6th, 2010
Tumblr is going on its 15th hour of downtime (that I’ve noticed). In an effort to let everyone know what is going on they’ve only sent 1 tweet about it. No emails. Nothing on the “downtime” page.
On Twitter they only have 40,000 followers and as far as I know they have millions of users. So obviously most of their community has no idea what is going on.
As someone who has been in this type of situation with Viddler (though our longest period of downtime has only been a few hours in 5 years) I can sympathize with the amount of effort that is going on behind the scenes by their entire team. However, let this be a lesson for the rest of us in what not to do.
Update: And just like that they’ve sent out a second tweet. With their own Tumblr-powered blog being down I suppose their options were limited in how they can communicate with their community.
Update again: Tumblr has now published a post-mordem report on what happened, how they’re dealing with it, and how they hope it doesn’t happen again. No new information though the words do seem sincere.
I’m sure Tumblr, and everyone that was watching this all happen, learned a lot of lessons during this event.
October 27th, 2010
I was going to wait until The Watercolor Gallery hit 150 or even 200 pieces in its archive before I gave another update but several key things are going on and I want them documented. For context see the announcement post, the 30 pieces update, the tools of The Watercolor Gallery, and the post celebrating 100 pieces in the gallery.
Today I’m going to focus on audience. I haven’t really talked much about audience since I began. To be honest, I wasn’t really focused on it. I was tracking it but I wasn’t worried about where the audience would come from or actively trying to grow the audience on my own. I didn’t buy any ads, share any links, or do anything special whatsoever. I simply focused on making a gallery that I would like to visit. In fact, the only update I gave regarding audience was back in August when I said:
“I have many, many ideas for The Watercolor Gallery and I’ll be working on them as the site gets more and more of an audience. Right now, after only a week, the audience seems to be near 50 people per day. I’m extremely happy with this.”
Well, the Watercolor Gallery has found an audience. Since that update there have been several surges in both traffic and people ‘following’ the gallery on Tumblr and Twitter. The two most notable surges amounted to thousands of new people being ‘members’ of the gallery. And if I was happy with 50 people per day I’m very happy for thousands. The two main surges resulted from a painting going ‘Tumblr-viral’ and, yesterday, The Watercolor Gallery being featured on Tumblr Tuesday.
By the way, having a single post go Tumblr-rival seemingly has more legs than being featured on Tumblr Tuesday. However, being featured is only 24 hours old so I’ll withhold firm judgement until the dust settles.
I have reason to be happy with The Watercolor Gallery gaining so much momentum in such a short period of time. As I said in August, I have plans for the gallery that would be utterly fruitless without a fairly large audience. So far I’ve added two new series to the gallery in addition to the paintings.
The artist interview series has been a smashing success. It isn’t easy, and took a bit of work from me to get rolling but so far the interviews that have been published are just great and the upcoming interviews (of which I have 12 in the can right now) are just outstanding. Watercolor artists are part of a global community and this fact shines through these interviews. So far I’ve published interviews with artists in Bangkok, Thailand, Waxahachie, Texas, Scarborough, England, Los Angeles, California and Jerome, Arizona. These interviews have not been the most popular (in terms of “likes” or “reblogs” on Tumblr) posts on the gallery but – I think – they add a certain professional nature to the gallery as a whole. The Watercolor Gallery isn’t just a Tumblog that reblogs every watercolor painting that passes by my desk. It is a serious look at how artists can be inspired by looking at and learning from other artists, their paintings and their workspaces.
Which leads us to the Artspaces series. In a word, this series has been a flop. I’ve gotten absolutely zero submissions since I began this series on the gallery. Zero. The artspaces that you see on the site have been gathered by me personally. I’ve searched for them, asked for permission from their respective owners to publish them, written the posts and published them. But I’m not giving up. I believe we have a lot to learn from the workspaces of every artist. I believe every artist should want to have their artspace published on The Watercolor Gallery – for two main reasons. First, I think it is an easy way to be seen on the gallery (whether or not the artist specializes in watercolor). With the audience growing every day it now means something to be featured on the gallery. Second, I think it is a fun series and who doesn’t like to have fun? I might be wrong about the Artspaces series but I’m going to give it a little while to catch on before I make that decision.
I believe the Tumblr community is one of less interaction then online communities of the past. They’d rather simply click a “like” button on a photo then read an entire post, submit a photo to your site or compete in a contest. At least, that is the way that it appears. I plan on overcoming this challenge by, hopefully, providing something valuable to everyone that joins the gallery. I hope The Watercolor Gallery becomes a notable moment in an artist’s journey when they are featured there and for it to be another tool for artists all over the world to be inspired by others.
The future of The Watercolor Gallery looks very bright. Some of the things I thought I would have to wait months to be able to try I believe I can do sooner thanks to these boosts in audience. I’m looking forward to working even harder on making The Watercolor Gallery a truly special place for watercolor artists and those they inspire to gather together and enjoy each other’s work and company. I’m extremely happy that so many people have thought it worthy of their “follow”.
October 15th, 2010
I thought I’d take a few moments and jot down a few thoughts on Tumblr. And I’ve done just that, over on Tumblr.
October 6th, 2010
The new Tumblr queue just went live and it is fantastic. My being able to curate The Watercolor Gallery is solely based on Tumblr’s queue feature and now it just got even better.
To be specific, I really loathed the fact that Tumblr would tell you how many minutes it was until a post would go live. So, if I had a post that was to go live a week from now the queue would read something like “This post will be published in 10,000 minutes.”. That made it very difficult to schedule posts based on my desired schedule (twice or three times per day spaced out evenly).
Anyway, that gripe is now long gone. Thanks Tumblr.
September 16th, 2010
We live in an increasingly interesting world where creating something from nothing is getting easier and easier. Several years ago I would say that it was easier than ever to set up a new website and get going. The same is true today, of course, but I am just as astounded by this fact today as I was then.
The Watercolor Gallery is not even two months old yet and it has 70+ pieces of art in its archive, a Twitter account, a brand-new domain name thanks to Jesse Davis, a fledgling yet unused mailing list (you can subscribe on the gallery’s homepage), and much more.
How, in such a short period of time, could one person who is running this website as a few-hours-a-week hobby possibly have set all of this up? It is all about the tools.
The website, as you’re undoubtedly aware, is using Tumblr for both hosting and the content management. I use the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet to quickly create drafts during the week as I rummage around the Internet – which I’ll then go back in later (typically on Sunday mornings) and pretty them up, write some sort of description and queue them up for the entire week. Tumblr has made creating posts for the site quicker than any other software I’ve ever tried – and I’ve used a lot over the last 16 years.
The mailing list, which I haven’t yet used but am collecting email addresses for to the tune of a few a day, is powered by Mail Chimp. For my use, so far, Mail Chimp is free and simple to use. Win, win.
Having an account on Twitter has several advantages. Many people do not use feed readers. Having a Twitter account, even though there are a very few people following it currently, makes it possible for those that do not use feed readers but do use Twitter to keep up-to-date with the gallery. The other main advantage is being able to engage the community and artists that I find on Twitter under The Watercolor Gallery’s brand other than my own Twitter account.
To track the statistics for The Watercolor Gallery I’m using Google Analytics. It does a pretty decent job of quickly showing me what people are most interested in on the site as well as whether or not people simply come and go or if they stick around and look through the gallery or not. It is pretty interesting to see.
For an upcoming artist interview series, wherein I will interview some of the artists who have been featured on the gallery already, I am using a quickly thrown together and free Wufoo form. This form asks the artists the same few questions, collates all of the information together for me, and emails me an easily digestable block of text that I can then use for the interview itself. It is quite wonderful really.
Aside from that I may need to edit an image here or there to fit the gallery – which I use the incredible Acorn for.
Although I’m sure the number of tools I use to make life easy over at The Watercolor Gallery will increase or change – I’m really happy about how easy it is to put out what I think is a fantastic website.
September 10th, 2010
Zach Inglis, a man whose opinion I hold in fairly high regard, simply went off on Tumblr for a variety of reasons on why he thinks Tumblr sucks. He notes technological, design and even personal reasons – most of which I do not agree with.
There is something to learn from this I think. How can one person, who has had an account at this service for many years, have such trouble with it while I – and I’d wager many others – have little or no problems using it? People are different, sure, and I’d guess that may lead to Inglis’ opinions being different than mine but some of the issues he’s had – you’d think – should have been had by all that use Tumblr and not just him.
Although I’ve had a Tumblr account for a while my first serious use of the service has come from what I’m doing with The Watercolor Gallery. So far Tumblr has worked like a dream for me to be able to put this gallery together without taking up much of my time or effort to make it happen. Tumblr is easy-to-use and has just the right amount of tools to make posting nearly effortless for my needs. The service has seemed fairly stable during my use (at least, I haven’t noticed an unreasonable amount of downtime for a rapidly growing mostly-free service). And, the design decisions that they’ve made I really appreciate.
While Inglis is moving to WordPress I’m thinking about moving away from it. I don’t know if I’d use Tumblr for my main site or not – but it is certainly in the mix.
In fact, Tumblr seems to get better at an incredibly rapid pace. There are weeks when Tumblr seems to have an announcement every single day. For a small team I think they are doing a pretty good job.
Every one has a right to put their opinions out there for all to see and comment on. You all know I’ve done that here from time-to-time. I just thought I’d weigh in to hopefully bring some balance to Zach’s comments. I hope he feels better soon. 
August 27th, 2010
After a little over a week of posting over on The Watercolor Gallery I thought I’d write down a short and sweet update. You know, for posterity.
Lets just say I’m enjoying myself. I’ve wanted to put together a site like this for longer than I can remember. Tumblr has made this incredibly easy. So far The Watercolor Gallery’s archive is sporting over 30 works of art dating from 1868 to 2010. I’m learning how to keep on a schedule, to build up a queue for times when I’m not near the computer, and also finding my slightly critical but more or less positive voice for the blog.
I have many, many ideas for The Watercolor Gallery and I’ll be working on them as the site gets more and more of an audience. Right now, after only a week, the audience seems to be near 50 people per day. I’m extremely happy with this.
The first idea is to have weekly feature threads which I’m starting this week. This week’s feature thread is Scrolls from China. Each day The Watercolor Gallery will feature a work from their archive in hopes to bring some attention to orphans in need in China. (The posts for the entire week are already in the queue and scheduled thanks to Tumblr.)
Other ideas that I have will require a slightly larger audience. Also, a slightly more global audience. As it stands, as far as I can tell from the few statistics I’ve been able to gather, most of the visitors to the gallery have been from the United States.
If you enjoy watercolor in anyway please consider following on Tumblr or subscribing to the gallery’s feed.