It’s finally happened. Can the Tumblrpocalypse be far behind?
The change was made official with the release of Google’s 2012 search stats, but people have seen it coming for a while—XKCD first predicted last April that “Tumblr” would replace “blog” as a Google search term, and in November 2012 Tumblr became one of the ten most-visited sites in the world. Plus the traditional blog has been in decline for some time. All the way back in 2009—forever ago in Internet years—The Guardian‘s Charles Arthur predicted the downfall of the blog, saying “writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting.”
Or reblogging a gifset, as it happens.
I’m not convinced this means much of anything, other than “Tumblr is really, really popular,” which we knew already. Single-serving Tumblr blogs like Texts from Hillary and Feminist Ryan Gosling have gotten a ton of attention this year, and then there are all of the individual users (myself included) who while away their evenings scrolling their dash, chortling over memes, fanart, and Tumblr’s particular brand of random insanity.
The news has me wondering about Tumblr’s eventual decline, though. How will it happen? Will the site just peter out, Livejournal-style? Or is the fandom vs non-fandom schism going to come to head in a site-wide explosion of autoplay music embeds, porn, FUNNY THINGS BOLDED AND ITALICIZED FOR EMPHASIS, and an re-emergence of long-forgotten memes that will cause founder David Karp to take an axe to the servers in a fit of nightblogging-esque madness. The revolution is coming, and it will be accompanied by cries of “Where’s the &*$!ing airport?!?!?!“
That seems more Tumblr’s style to me.
(via: The Daily Dot)
