President Obama has added a new web service to his repertoire: Tumblr, the hot blogging service that just raised another $85 million in funding. You can find the new blog right here.
The site was set up by the 2012 Obama/Biden campaign, which also runs his Facebook page and Twitter account (The White House also recently launched an account on Foursquare).
Tumblr is generally known for having a youngish audience (particularly teens), and its reblog feature will help anything the campaign posts spread like wildfire across the service. The folks at Tumblr are undoubtedly smiling — the President’s presence can be worn as a badge of honor, and also generally leads to plenty of free mainstream press coverage.
In the first post on his blog, Obama’s team writes that they want Tumblr to “be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.”
To do this, the site will be accepting submissions via the Tumblr submission feature. Fortunately the campaign isn’t being naive — they’ve preemptively asked submitters to think of their mothers before they send anything nasty.
There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people—fairly nice ones—and that your mother would want you to be polite.
Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
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