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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?

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"A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely."

From their about page:

"What is Tumblr? Millions of people sharing the things they do, find, love, think, or create."

Even if you can do more than a simple blog with tumblr, at its base it is a blogging platform. It's perfect for a startup that is busy doing lots of other things... if it wasn't for the fact that it's always down. I hope they'll someday add a "Always Up and running, no trouble" to their "30 reasons you'll love tumblr".

No, it's a micro-blogging platform. Traditional blog posts are something that have been shoehorned in to try and garner new audiences. Tumblr is never the right choice for an existing publication. That's why many fashion magazines have Tumblrs that run alongside their traditional blogs.

There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.

It's certainly blocked at my workplace.

But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd imagine it's not blocked.

If you host your blog on something.yourdomain.com, it'll be accessible even if tumblr isn't, right?

Do most corporate firewalls do deep packet inspection? I think that they'd mostly just be blocking domains based on a blacklist, or with a regex.

Since most startups would be using a subdomain of their own domain for their tumblr blog, so I don't think this is an issue.

Yeah, I've always been surprised that people consider Tumblr as a platform for anything except hosting short posts (pictures/videos/clips/quotes/etc.) The brevity it [to me] encourages (plus the social features it has) places it somewhere closer to the Twitter side of a continuum between Twitter and Wordpress or Blogger. This is mostly in my head, of course, but I just didn't realize others felt differently until somewhat recently.

Agreed and I use tumblr a lot for my personal reblog http://stammy.com but I wouldn't host any important startup blog stuff there.

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