Tumblr is introducing a new feature today that lets its users pay a dollar in order to have their post featured on the Tumblr Dashboard. The option is called “Highlights,” and it’s now available right from the new post page on Tumblr. With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important.

“Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo,” wrote Tumblr’s David Karp on the company blog this morning.

In typical Tumblr cutesy style, the Highlights option includes six icons: a lightning bolt, caution sign, heart, megaphone, unicorn (!) or cheeseburger (uh…what?).

There are also dozen of messages to choose from, like “help!,” “urgent!,” “watch this!,” “cool!,” etc. Some messages pertain to events (“save the date!”) while others refer to news (“today only”), products (“buy this!”) or even questions (“answer this!”).

In addition to being marked and annotated, the highlighted post is slightly larger and has bigger font, too.

Before publishing a post with a Highlight, you’ll be prompted to fill in your credit card info or make the $1.00 payment via PayPal. Whether or not the option really brings in more eyeballs and clickthroughs remains to be seen, especially since the low barrier to entry could see the feature used so regularly that Tumblr users end up with Highlight-blindness.

But for now, the trick is working. (Oh hey, BuzzFeed has an awesome new iPad app? Brb).

Update: Tickets are now sold out. Be sure to keep your eye out for ticket giveaways and for when we release our next batch of tickets.

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App, the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like TaskRabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.

There are some pretty good match-ups this year. Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline for Best Social App, along with the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0). The Kindle Fire is competing with the iPad 2 for Best New Device. And Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Fab, and Codecademy are all vying for Best New Startup (even though two of those were complete pivots). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is up for Angel of the Year. His seed investment in Zynga is worth 160 times what he paid for it. But AngelList founders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi are also finalists in the category for helping to democratize angel investing, along with Conway, Rabois, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Kevin Rose (who has a killer portfolio that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, and Square). Who will win?

Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote. The rules state that you may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are one of the finalists, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and get them to vote for you. Winners will be announced on January 31, live at the Crunchies.

In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can.

Here are your Finalists:

Best Technology Achievement (2010 winner: Google Self Driving Cars)
Lytro (Related posts)
NFC (Related posts)
OnLive (Related posts)
Siri (Related posts)
Tesla Flat Pack Battery (Related posts)

Best Social Application (2010 winner: DailyBooth)
Facebook Timeline (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Google+ (Related posts)
The New New Twitter (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)

Best Shopping Application (2010 winner: Groupon)
Birchbox (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Lot18 (Related posts)
Warby Parker (Related posts)

Best Mobile Application (2010 winner: Google Mobile Maps for Android)
Evernote (Related posts)
Flipboard (Related posts)
Pandora (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
TaskRabbit (Related posts)

Best Location Application (New category for 2011)
Airbnb (Related posts)
Foursquare (Related posts)
Grindr (Related posts)
RunKeeper (Related posts)
Uber (Related posts)

Best Tablet Application (2010 winner: Flipboard)
djay (Related posts)
Eventbrite At the Door (Related posts)
Fotopedia (Related posts)
GarageBand (Related posts)
Netflix (Related posts)
StumbleUpon (Related posts)

Best Design (2010 winner: gogobot)
Gojee (Related posts)
Orchestra (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)

Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired)
Github (Related posts)
Imgur (Related posts)
Instapaper (Related posts)
Onesheet (Related posts)
Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) (Related posts)

Best Cloud Service (New category for 2011)
Asana (Related posts)
Box (Related posts)
CloudFlare (Related posts)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Okta (Related posts)
Twilio (Related posts)

Best International Startup (2010 winner: Viki)
Badoo (Related posts)
Klarna (Related posts)
Peixe Urbano (Related posts)
Rovio (Related posts)
SoundCloud (Related posts)
Wonga (Related posts)

Best Clean Tech Startup (2010 winner: SolarCity)
Alta Energy (Related posts)
Array Power (Related posts)
EcoATM (Related posts)
EcoMotors (Related posts)
Hara (Related posts)

Best New Device (2010 winner: iPad)
Galaxy Nexus (Related posts)
iPad 2 (Related posts)
iPhone 4S (Related posts)
Kindle Fire (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)

Best Time Sink (2010 winner: Cityville)
Modern Warfare 3 (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)
Skyrim (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)
Words With Friends (Related posts)

Biggest Social Impact (New category for 2011)
Charity: Water (Related posts)
Khan Academy (Related posts)
Kickstarter (Related posts)
Practice Fusion (Related posts)
Twitter (Related posts)

Angel of the Year (2010 winner: Paul Graham)
Ron Conway (Related posts)
Paul Graham (Related posts)
Reid Hoffman (Related posts)
Keith Rabois (Related posts)
Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (AngelList) (Related posts for Naval) (Related posts for Babak)
Kevin Rose (Related posts)

VC of the Year (2010 winner: Yuri Milner)
Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (Related posts for Marc) (Related posts for Ben)
Matt Cohler (Related posts)
Vinod Khosla (Related posts)
Aileen Lee (Related posts)
Yuri Milner (Related posts)
David Sze (Related posts)

Founder of the Year (2010 winner: Mark Pincus)
Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) (Related posts)
Brian Chesky (Airbnb) (Related posts)
Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) (Related posts)
Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) (Related posts for Susan) (Related posts for Ali)
Drew Houston (Dropbox) (Related posts)

CEO of the Year (2010 winner: Andrew Mason)
Dick Costolo (Twitter) (Related posts)
Daniel Ek (Spotify) (Related posts)
Phil Libin (Evernote) (Related posts)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Related posts)
Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) (Related posts)

Best New Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Quora)
Codecademy (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)

Best Overall Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Twitter)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
Tumblr (Related posts)

5th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com.

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

Lightbox, the beautifully designed social photo app for Android backed by $1.2 million in seed funding from Index, Accel, SV Angel, 500 Startups, and others, is today launching a revamped web interface that’s like a lazy man’s Tumblr. As with the hot blogging startup Tumblr, the idea with Lightbox’s new photo journal feature is to provide a stream of updates others can follow, share, like and comment on.

For all its simplicity, Tumblr still involves the set up of a blog and mostly manual updates. Automatic posting of content requires additional configuration or the use of third-party tools. But with today’s Lightbox update, all users get their own Tumblr-esque photo blog, no extra effort required.

Previously, Lightbox users were given a page for their public photos at a custom URL (format: your-username.lightbox.com), but the layout involved pages of thumbnails to click through. Today, that URL will now become a photo blog, where photos are automatically organized into albums for you. To accomplish this, Lightbox looks at the timestamp associated with the photos taken, enabling the service to group photos together appropriately. The end result is an automatically created photo blog with an attractive layout which ends up feeling very much like Tumblr. Here’s an example. And here’s another.

Users are given a “follow” button next to which their social stats display, including the number of photos posted, number of followers and the number of people they’re following in return. When you hover over one of the photos, you can quickly click a heart button to “like” it. You can view these favorites later on from your profile section. On an individual photo’s page, you can comment, tweet, share to Facebook or Google+. The entire post itself can be socially shared as well.

Lightbox has been an interesting company to watch, given its focus on building for Android first. Despite the mobile platform’s large market share, it’s still rare to see companies choosing Android over iOS for their debut. But that’s where Lightbox’s creators, Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel, see a market opportunity.

So far, the company seems to be proving there is a case for well-designed apps on Android (And it’s not the only one). Lightbox has now reached nearly 1 million downloads in less than six months. Going forward, the focus will be on both Android and HTML5. For example, the new Lightbox website and photo blogs are optimized for HTML5 web browsers, including Safari on the iPhone and iPad.

Lightbox’s update was submitted to the Android Market this morning, and the rollout to all of Google’s servers should complete by 9 AM PST today. You can download the Android app here.

Is Tumblr facing a growing spam problem? For many regular users of the blogging platform, the answer is “yes.” Although Tumblr hasn’t taken to its own blog to provide a public update on its progress in fighting spam, it did recently address the concerns of a high-profile Tumblr user – the associate producer of NPR’s Fresh Air, Melody Kramer, who maintains a blog for the popular program hosted on the Tumblr platform.

To Kramer, Tumblr acknowledged that it’s aware of a recent increase in spam blogs and is “doing everything we can to quickly suspend these blogs and to keep more of them from being created.”

Last week, a post by Croatian blogger Sven Duplić about the percentage of Tumblr users that are spam bots sparked a discussion both in the comments section as well as on Hacker News. (BetaBeat has a good summary of this). The takeaway is that for some Tumblr users, the issue is worse than it is for others.

But for NPR’s Fresh Air, the problem was bad enough to prompt Kramer to post a snarky message to Tumblr spammers earlier this month, perhaps as a way to get Tumblr itself to step in and address the problem:

Dear Tumblr Spammers,

If you’re going to follow Fresh Air and then like 30 of the posts, why not like the most recent posts? If you’re simply trying to get people to find their way to your page, liking posts from last February — all in a row — probably won’t help.

Yours truly,

Mel

Tumblr has now replied to the issue, essentially confirming it’s aware of the growing spam problem and is doing everything it can to fight it.

The full message reads:

Hello, Melody. Please know that we’re aware of a recent increase in blogs with odd URLs that are following large numbers of users. We’re doing everything we can to quickly suspend these blogs and to keep more of them from being created.

As Tumblr finds and suspends these blogs, you may see that your Followers count seems incorrect for a period of time. Our Follower indexing system time to recognize that a given blog has been suspended and to then not count that suspended blog in your Followers count. We’ll update your Followers count correctly after a period of time.

The fact that one or more of these blogs has Followed you, Reblogged your content, or Liked your content will not compromise the security of your Tumblr account or the security of your computer in any way.

If you’d like, you can Block any blogs that are causing you concern. Blocking does not prevent someone from showing up as Follower or prevent them from viewing a public blog’s web pages or RSS feed. But you can use http://tumblr.com/block so that they can’t see your posts on their Dashboard, you don’t see them listed in post notes or in Dashboard notifications, and you don’t get Messages from them.

We are sorry that this issue has occurred and are doing everything that we can to address it quickly. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.

Unfortunately, for Kramer and the rest of Tumblr’s user base, the issue may not be as simple as spammers just sneaking in links to their sites via the platform’s liking system, although that’s the most visible problem.

Spammers typically use the Tumblr “like” button to create backlinks to their sites by creating hundreds or thousands of fake Tumblr accounts that go around “liking” other people’s Tumblr posts. It’s not all that different from the problem where spammers infiltrate blog commenting systems to link to their sites, or the now nearly discarded system of using Trackbacks to indicate when someone else has linked to your post from theirs. (Trackbacks, popular in the early days of blogging, became so overrun by spammers, that today, most bloggers just shut them off.)

Tumblr’s growth, certainly, has been remarkable. In September, it raised $85 million in new funding, bringing its total funding to over $125 million. But it’s unclear when the company talks about its “30 million blogs” with “40 million posts per day,” what percentage of those are being created by spammers.

Even more importantly, perhaps, is that spammers on Tumblr aren’t just using the platform to build backlinks – it some cases, their Tumblr profiles even contain a payload, like a link to a malicious piece of malware. Here’s one example, uncovered by shortformblog, who found bit.ly links hidden in the source code of a suspect Tumblr profile which pointed to a rogue Flash file download.

If clicking through to Tumblr profiles could lead to malware infections on your PC, then Tumblr has a serious problem on its hands, much worse than the annoyance of likespam and shady SEO tactics.

Of course, uncovering how widespread the malware problem may be requires source code checks and analysis best left up to security researchers. That being said, it goes to follow that where there’s spam, there’s malware.

Hopefully, Tumblr will use its new funding to quickly and efficiently address this issue before it becomes much worse.

Update: As a part of the crackdown, it looks like Tumblr is adding ref=nofollow on its like links now. (Note: this is not an official confirmation from the company).  

Image credits: shortformblog

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.

Blogging community operator Tumblr has raised $85 million in new funding from Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Richard Branson also participated in the round.

The news was broken moments ago by the NYT’s Jenna Wortham, who writes that the company will announce the financing later today.

The round brings Tumblr’s total of capital raised to over $125 million. The valuation of the company in its latest financing round was not disclosed.

Business Insider pegged the valuation at ‘$800 million+’ last August.

The funding comes at a time when Tumblr is experiencing massive growth across the board. Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp told us last June that the service recently hit 400 million pageviews in a single day (which comes down to roughly 5,000 pageviews a second).

According to Wortham, 30 million blogs have been created using Tumblr to date, which now generate more than 40 million posts every day.

Update: here’s more info from the official release:

This year alone, we’ve grown from 2 to 13 billion pageviews a month, with tremendous international adoption. Mobile pageviews have increased 17 times during that period. And the 30 million blogs on Tumblr now generate more than 40 million posts per day, passing 10 billion total posts just two weeks ago.

This year our little team has grown from 15 to 50, and it is incredibly important to us that we work with partners who understand our vision and share our ambition to build the best platform for the most creative people in the world.

Last Summer, Tumblr released a revamped iPhone app, which also helped spike the numbers.

For your further reading (and viewing) pleasure: TC Cribs: Inside Tumblr’s Reblog-Worthy Digs

This morning, I logged into Tumblr (where I run my personal blog) and saw confetti flying everywhere on the screen. Was Tumblr hacked? Were they converting the platform to be Geocities-powered complete with animated GIFs? No, they were celebrating. They just hit 10 billion posts across the network.

The numbers are staggering. It was only a year ago that they hit 1 billion posts. Since then, they’ve 10x’d that number.

The traffic numbers are just as impressive. In July of last year, Tumblr was seeing 1.5 billion pageviews a month — that number now stands at 13 billion. Yes, they almost managed to 10x that number as well. And unlike numbers from Compete or Alexa which tend to be utter crap, Tumblr uses Quantcast data which is fairly solid (though still not perfect) because it’s directly measured.

The service also now says it has just under 28.5 million blogs. And those blogs are doing around 36 million posts a day (that’s up from 4.5 million last July).

Amid this insane growth, Tumblr has run headfirst into some major scaling issues. That remains a priority for the team right now. Well, that and the massive round of funding they’re about to close that should value them near $1 billion.

We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, and this one is sure to be a crowd pleaser: red-hot blogging platform Tumblr. The NYC-based startup has been growing like crazy (they’re now up to 11.6 billion page views per month), and they’ve given us a chance to take a peek inside their headquarters.

For a company with over $40 million in funding the Tumblr team is still surprisingly small, and the office is relatively humble. But there’s plenty of charm: handcrafted furniture, board games abound, and robots that look suspiciously like my favorite wizard.

Be sure to watch til the end, when I get to walk Tumblr founder David Karp’s dog. Huh?

As always, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the fantastic editing.

Also be sure to check out our previous episodes of TC Cribs:

• Inside The Psychobox: A Tour Of Dropbox’s Bumping Office
• Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!)
• Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp’s 5-Star Pad
• TC Cribs: IGN HQ Gets Its Game On With Lawn Gnomes, Plumbers, And Creepy Dinosaurs
• TC Cribs: From Frenchmen To Randy Raccoons, An Inside Look At Seesmic
• TC Cribs: Inside The Snuggified Home Of Posterous
• TC Cribs: Meebo’s Headbanging, Rocket-Flinging Office (With Magical Passageways)
• TC Cribs: Unlock The Secrets Of GroupMe HQ (Beware The Time-Out Chair)

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace.  You can now find Tom on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+

What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?

Blogging or “self-publishing” in any form was supposed to democratize and revolutionize the media industry. Content creators no longer needed mainstream platforms to get their voices heard. Bloggers weren’t beholden to editors, and self-publishers could monetize their content with AdWords or any host of ad network partners.

Three days ago, Kevin Rose posted this on Google+: “Decided to forward http://kevinrose.com to my Google+. G+ gives me more (real-time) feedback and engagement than my blog ever did.” His decision set off a little debate on the pros and cons of doing so.

Kevin’s decision was made rapidly, and may well be reversed when it suits his needs. His sense of G+ went from questioning the value of the service in his first post (since deleted), to musing on how Google+ was more like a blog, to completely switching over on Friday. (I prodded him via text message on Thursday: “dude ur totally going to replace ur blog with Google+”)

Where to host your content is a tricky issue. When blogging started to become a serious endeavor and Internet folks realized they could amass their own audiences, they naturally assumed it was important to own their domain, control their distribution list, maintain the links that have been built up to their content, or in summary, control their own destiny.

And again, this is not just an issue for bloggers. It’s about web presence generally. Remember TV commercials promoting AOL keywords. Would brands have been smarter to promote their own websites? How about musicians using Myspace as their only website? Bands first used MySpace as an adjunct to their website, but gradually more and more of them found maintaining their own website a pain and shut them down entirely. Even major recording artists printed their MySpace URLs (and not their website URLs) on their CD covers. Visit those MySpace URLs now and they’re ghost towns. How about Youtube video channels. Can you imagine a day when Youtube is no longer the best place to find video?

Phrasing the issue in a new way, and perhaps a better way is: Should a content creator go to his audience, or should he expect his audience to come to him?

In the offline world, most writers would never think to publish their own magazine or newspaper. A writer uses the distribution of a larger platform/brand (WSJ, NYT, Time) to get his story and name out. But on the Web, some have argued that technology has changed all that. Has it?

That model of posting everything on your own domain might have worked in the earlier days of the Internet. But who is so interesting that they can get a large enough audience to keep a bookmark and check their website? Technorati doesn’t show a single personal blog in the top 100.

Personal brand (general recognition), site loyalty, and SEO is sort of the slow-build attractor to the old model of self-publishing. Clearly today, a blogger needs a mechanism to notify people of his posts—an email list (still semi-old school), Twitter (short posts leading & luring to the long-form), guests posts on largely trafficked sites (such as TechCrunch), and social networks like Facebook (Fan Pages) and Google+.

In the end, where you make your home depends on why you create content. If you want your little spot on the Internet to share some media or express your musings, then Tumblr or any other platform may be for you. If you’re Mark Suster or Fred Wilson, you may not want the level of engagement something like Google+ could bring. As VCs who hold the perceived keys to the kingdom for many a young entrepreneur, Mark and Fred probably appreciate that people have to do a little work and research to find their respective blogs and interact with them. They’d probably rather limit the discussion than be overwhelmed by the engagement and traffic that posting all their content on G+ would bring.

But more than anything, I think, you need to remain flexible and pay attention to how the Internet is evolving. There’s no one-size fits all strategy, and you’ll probably want to modify your own strategy as it suits your needs. As certain traffic sources (tech blogs, social networks) rise and fall, you may need to ride them up, and transition your audience on the way down. When Tila Tequila (a MySpace user with millions of friends) started to see MySpace was a sinking ship, she jumped to Twitter and later to Facebook. If you’re looking for a certain type of audience, then maybe you need to find where that audience hangs out, bring your content to them, and hopefully—if you want—bring some of them back to your “home base”.

Kevin abandoned his blog in an instant, whereas Fred built up his blog over years and years. What school do you belong to?

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.

Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network.

Facebook also reached an all-time high in terms of U.S. traffic in June, according to newly released comScore data. In June, Facebook saw 160.8 million unique vistors in the U.S., which is up from 157.2 million uniques in May. The company also announced that it crossed the 750 million active users mark worldwide in June as well.

Tumblr saw 11.8 million unique visitors in June, up from 10.7 million unique visitors in May. In June, we reported that Tumblr was seeing around 400 million pageviews per day, thanks in part to international growth and faster response times.

If you are part of the Tumblr Nation, and a growing number of you are, then you will want to download Tumblr’s new iPhone app, redesigned from the ground up with a new interface. It loads up your Tumblr Dashboard stream, but the post button brings up six simple icons for each post type: text, photo, link, quote, audio, and video.And then, of course, you can post photos or videos right from your phone.

New features include support for multiple Tumblogs, landscape editing, replying to messages, and saving drafts. It also taps into your address book on your phone to help you find other people to follow on Tumblr. And new users can sign up right from the mobile app.

It looks gorgeous, and it is a fully-featured mobile blogging app (with photo-sharing!). I love the recording feature too that uses your phone’s mic for audio posts. What more could you ask for?

More details on the Tumblr blog.

I noticed this when Tumblr President John Maloney posted earlier today that Tumblr was now doing north of 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. That number was around 7 billion just a month ago, and when I drilled down into Tumblr’s publicly available numbers on Quantcast, I noticed a massive surge in pageviews in the last few weeks. So massive, in fact, that the data looks more like a solar flare.

So what happened? It turns out, there was a bit of a bug in Tumblr’s data previously — one that led Quantcast to undercount pageview data. ”Last week we noticed a growing discrepancy between our Google Analytics and Quantcast numbers. It turns out that we broke our Quantcast tracking code a few weeks ago and were no longer reporting any impressions past page one of the Dashboard. We fixed it and quickly saw the Quantcast data jump up to near symmetry with GA,” Karp tells us.

So what does that mean for Tumblr’s numbers? Well, throw that 250 million pageviews a day out the windows. Last Thursday, Tumblr hit 400 million pageviews for the day, Karp tells us. It’s close to 5,000 pageviews a second, he notes.

Karp credits international growth and faster response times to Tumblr’s amazing trajectory. Maloney is more specific. “Tumblr’s growth the last few months has been remarkable, overshadowing everything in the past. It’s coming from all over the globe and across all demos, in particular teenagers,” he says.

Both men are also quick to credit the Tumblr engineering team which has been handling the load after downtime problems earlier in the year.

With the new data, Tumblr is now one of the top 25 sites in the U.S. according to the data Quancast tracks.

[image: flickr/nasa]

As time goes on, even if inbox overload isn’t a problem for you right now, it will be. And I’m increasingly convinced that there is no actual solution. A ton of people are out there working on the problem — companies both big and small. Some of the “solutions” are nice and smart. But they’re all either masks or temporary fixes. No one wants to admit the truth: only real way to solve the email problem is to blow email up and start over again.

But that will obviously be a massive undertaking that will likely take years to get everyone on the same page, using the same service/protocol — if it works at all. So for now, might I suggest you do what I do and use a bunch of smaller solutions to ease the email pressure? And a new one appeared today: Tumblr.

Of course, Tumblr is not billing their new inbox features as an email-replacement. But it does somewhat fulfill that purpose. You see, since I run my personal blog on Tumblr, a lot of people use the Ask feature to write to me. The problem has been that up until now the only way to respond to these messages has been publicly. Yes, it was essentially Formspring, but where every answer had to be posted to your blog. There would often be questions that I would want to answer, but did not want them posted to my site (either for clutter reasons, or because the person asking was revealing information they probably didn’t want me to publish). But the new “Private Answers” feature unveiled today by Tumblr allows you to message other users without posting anything.

Tumblr also added a unified inbox that resides in the top toolbar of the Dashboard which alerts you when you have a new message (and submissions if you have those enabled). And clicking into this area will show you the messages coming in from all of your Tumblr sites (if you have more than one, obviously). And there’s new option to delete all messages as well.

Yes, all of this stuff is rudimentary for a messaging system. But again, it does offer a small email relief in that it’s a new system with a slightly higher barrier to entry (you need to have a Tumblr account, unless you choose to allow anonymous messages). Mixed with Facebook Messages, Twitter, Twitter DMs, group messaging apps (Beluga, GroupMe, etc), and soon iMessage, I have a bunch of small work-arounds to avoid the nightmare that is my email inbox.

And yes, I know this sounds insane. But that’s how much I hate email.

Tumblr’s new messages are the first of “a whole bunch” of new features they’re getting ready to launch alongside their newly updated (and slick) Dashboard.

Exclusive - In a conversation with TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid after his panel on scaling fast-growing Internet businesses, Tumblr CEO David Karp talks not only about his lazy dog but also some new product developments that should be going live right about now.

In short, Tumblr has given Directory, where people looking for great content on the network have had the chance to find their fix for years now, a decent upgrade.

As Karp says, Tumblr Directory as a source for unique content and users on Tumblr blogs has gone through a lot of iterations over the years, going all the way back to the introduction of something called ‘Tumblarity’ in May 2009. The biggest problem so far has been finding a way to prevent people from gaming the system.

The new Tumblr Directory is based on two main pillars:

On one side, the startup has developed algorithms to suggest people and blogs to users based on a ton of metrics, and on the other side there will be some sort of editorial spotlight with Tumblr staffers suggesting content that “really stands out”, helped by community activity.

At the rate Tumblr’s been growing, the discovery of great content is certainly going to become harder over time, so let’s hope for the Tumblr community that the new Directory helps obliterate eventual issues with gaming the system for solid content recommendations.

To be perfectly frank, I have no idea if the new Tumblr Directory is already live (Karp mentioned it should be going live “in the next few hours” at some point during the interview) but here’s a screenshot I just took:

On their staff blog, Karp has just shared that Tumblr did 250 million pageviews — just yesterday. Yes, they’re now doing roughly the same number of pageviews a day as they were doing in an entire month two years ago. The data, which is being directly measured by Quantcast, doesn’t lie. And it’s amazing.

Tumblr is now doing roughly  7 billion pageviews a month — and it’s growing insanely fast. It was only mid-April that they hit 6 billion, and given the daily growth now, they’ll be at 8 billion shortly.

A year ago, Tumblr users were doing 4.5 million posts a day. Remarkably, that number today should hit 30 million. The service now has 18.8 million blogs across its network, and there have been 5.5 billion posts in total. It was August of last year that they surpassed 1 billion posts — in less than a year, they’re up over 5x.

Karp will be one of our guests this year on stage on day two at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York next week. The topic of discussion? “Managing Hockey-Stick Growth.” Given these amazing numbers and Tumblr’s issues with downtime in the past few months, the talk should be a great one.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the city’s first, chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, presented their Road Map for the Digital City, today.

The full plan is available here, on NYC.gov.

Before formulating the plan, Sterne led a comprehensive 90-day review of the city’s current use of web, social media and mobile technology, and surveyed thousands of public and private sector organizations, and residential users in New York to understand what was missing, and what’s working well so far.

In light of her findings, and according to a public statement from her office, New York City has committed to:

FACEBOOK
Before the end of July, to launch the city’s first, “streamlined” Facebook page, and integrate Facebook sharing features on Nyc.gov, eventually creating opportunities for New Yorkers to voice their opinions, engage in discussions, ask questions and participate in citywide polls via Facebook.

FOURSQUARE
Add public spaces to Foursquare, and launch a custom Foursquare badge encouraging visits to City spaces such as parks and cultural centers.

Develop a partnership between Foursquare and NYC’s Department of Small Business Services to distribute a small business, Foursquare tool-kit for local companies.

TWITTER
Launch an @nycgov Twitter account to provide residents with a “one-stop shop” for real-time updates on City news and services.

Become the first city to use Twitter’s just-announced Fast Follow service, which will allow New Yorkers to receive @nycgov Twitter updates via SMS by texting “follow nycgov” to 40404. (Neither a computer nor Twitter account is required to receive @nycgov Tweets via SMS text message.)

TUMBLR
Begin training city agencies that currently use social media, working with Tumblr, in particular to build city agency pages and train them in social media design and best practices.

OTHER
Redesign NYC.gov, hosting a hackathon at the local co-work space and incubator, General Assemb.ly, to gather ideas for this effort.

Create an advisory group within NYC government called SMART (Social Media Advisory & Research Taskforce) to manage the city’s social media feeds, evaluate new platforms and make recommendations on social media tools and strategies to all city agencies…updating guidelines and policies

Increase digital access among New Yorkers by introducing WiFi to more public spaces through federally funded initiatives, launching education and outreach efforts to increase broadband internet adoption and supporting more broadband choices citywide

In another demonstration of his committment to making NYC more tech-enabled, Mayor Bloomberg recently appointed serial entrepreneur, Art Chang, the founder and CEO of Tipping Point Partners, as Chair of the city’s Voter Assistance Advisory Committee. [hat tip: Techpresident.com]

New York City’s website – nyc.gov – engages approximately 2.8 million visitors per month and has an audience of over 1.2 million users via social media.

Image: New York City in winter, January 2011, via NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center under CC license

The basic behavior of the button is simple enough, but the advanced features are where the ‘Share on Tumblr’ button sets itself apart from other social engagement buttons out there.

With the ‘Share On Tumblr’ button,  publishers can decide whether their content appears as a Link, Quote, Video Embed or a Photo on Tumblr. The button is fully customizable and is versatile enough to appear anywhere on a site, whether at the footer of articles or while hovering over paragraphs. You can also choose whether the content will appear as an excerpt or summary when reposted on Tumblr.

Tumblr is responsible for 26 million visitors per month globally, according to comScore. Currently there are over 5 billion posts on Tumblr, 18 million total Tumblr blogs and there have been already 30 million Tumblr posts just today. Publisher-friendly options like a multi-faceted share button will indubitably increase that number, and drive considerable traffic to publishers.

The company raised $30 million in funding last December.

…and like magic, Tumblr has jumped in to the @abcnewsradio top 5 referrers.—
Dan Patterson (@DanPatterson) May 09, 2011

Yes, Tumblr is growing like crazy. But you know a social media site has arrived when big rock bands start releasing tracks from upcoming albums on your site. The Beastie Boys have a Tumblr blog, where you can listen to the song “Make Some Noise” from their next album.

According to Beastie Boy Mike D (who is really a Beastie Man now):

This wasn’t really part of the plan, but since this track is out there we wanted to let you hear it here first, or maybe second. Enjoy.

In the past, a rock band might have released a song early on Myspace or YouTube. But now, I guess, it’s all about Tumblr. The Beastie Boys offical site redirects to Tumblr, and even their Facebook page points to the Tumblr post.

If more bands flock to Tumblr, its growth should rocket even more. Below is a video from January with Tumblr founder David Karp talking about how fast the site is growing:

Some Internet wunderkinds don’t bother to finish college. Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school, and now runs one of the fastest growing publishing platforms on the Web. In our final segment from this week’s Founder Stories (also watch parts I, II, and III), Karp answers some of Chris Dixon’s rapid-fire questions in the video above. He talks about his best business decision ever (shutting down Tumblr’s profitable, niche, Web development business), why he has trouble sleeping, and how hiring the youngest, most brilliant engineers will become Tumblr’s “biggest recruiting advantage.”

On this last point, Karp says when Tumblr gets to “Google-scale” and Google is still only hiring Ph.Ds, “I want to grab 16-year-olds that are going to be brilliant and help them get there.” What about engineers with at least a college degree? Karp isn’t anti-education so much as he isn’t seeing colleges churn out the talent he needs. “The bigger problem is college isn’t making very good engineers and that is what this industry needs,” he says.

We also learn that Karp’s biggest heroes are “Steve Jobs and Willy Wonka.” Jobs makes total sense. Karp grew up being “obsessed with Steve Jobs keynotes” and the art of “the reveal.” But Willy Wonka? “It’s sort of the same as Steve—the idea that there is this magical factory, and you can’t begin to imagine what went into these things,” he explains. And, by the way, he thinks “Apple is way scarier” than Willy Wonka’s factory.

In addition to the rapid-fire questions above, you can listen to the full interview below (which we’ve already posted as separate clips over the past few days):

It’s a common criticism of popular Web services that don’t yet make a lot of money: Where’s the business model? That criticism has certainly been lobbed at Tumblr, the short-burst publishing platform all the kids are flocking to these days. Tumblr generates billions of pageviews across its networks and is growing at more than 250 million pageviews per week. “Making money off of Tumblr would be incredibly easy,” CEO David Karp tells Chris Dixon in the Founder Stories video above. A cheap AdSense ad on every member’s dashboard would make Tumblr “wildly profitable.”

So why doesn’t he do that? As he goes onto explain, he’d rather find ways to make money that also “enhance the experience for our users.” Tumblr does charge for things like being featured in its directory or $9 themes users can buy to spruce up their Tumblog. Karp notes that some theme designers are making tens of thousands of dollars month. Still, these seem more like ancillary revenue streams than what will end up being Tumbr’s main revenue source down the line. Fortunately for Karp, he has patient investors and just raised $30 million to keep scaling the service and figure out a more natural business model.

The challenges of scaling and keeping up with growth “has absolutely slowed down the product roadmap,” he admits. But his team is working hard to get back on track with both keeping the service up and rolling out new features.

Karp also talks about building a startup in New York City in the shadow of giant media conglomerates and how that gives him a different perspective than if Tumblr were based in Silicon Valley. (You can also watch Part I of the interview here, in which Karp talks about why traditional blogs aren’t for everyone).

Update: Watch Part I , III, and IV of this interview.