ParisLemon

A thoughtful post about Tumblr by Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch. Two things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently related to Tumblr:

1) The tags remain a pure goldmine. The mobile discovery features are great, but the desktop experience still needs a lot of work. I wonder if something as simple as a giant search box at the top of the page isn’t the answer…

Often, on mobile, I find myself getting lost in the tags pages. “James Bond” “Hemingway” — they’re all pure gold. Search for anything you’re interested in and there’s bound to be a huge amount of great content. And unlike Twitter, where it’s mainly text-based, this content is almost all visual. It’s a true treasure of consumable and shareable content.

I think Tumblr should make tagging far more automated — it’s still not very easy to tag — or offer a much more robust content search to take full advantage of this.

2) Along similar lines, it strikes me that Tumblr could be the property to reinvigorate true brand advertising. That is, rather than the search-based links that still dominate the online ad landscape, Tumblr could harken back to the heyday of advertising when it was truly a creative endeavor meant to get people to remember your brand when they do eventually make a purchasing decision.

Tumblr’s visual appeal seems perfect for this. And that’s especially true if people are searching for something (see: above).