In the don’t-call-them-comments notes section on my post about Tumblr’s new Highlighted Posts feature, Jenna Wortham brings up a good point:

Def agree its smart of Tumblr to try new things - but the return here seems minimal. You aren’t broadening yr audience by highlighting content to people who already read you. Best case: Someone spends an extra 5 secs looking at your post. Then what?

On the surface, true. But I think there are several interesting things this feature opens up for Tumblr. A “Highlighted” area is the most obvious. Or maybe something like: pay $1 to highlight a post to your followers, pay $10 to highlight to all of Tumblr. That would probably get a bit spammy so maybe you see the option to highlight to all only if you got enough “hearts” from the $1 highlight to those following you. 

That’s just a few quick ideas. There is a lot of potential here. 

But even the most simple angle may be interesting. You pay to highlight and your post get more hearts and reblogs as a result, so perhaps that post is seen by many more people than they normally would be. Doesn’t seem like a bad bet for $1.

More importantly, if Tumblr can get more credit cards on file for one-click transactions… a whole new world opens up.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about what I should write as my “goodbye 2011” post. I find myself doing this every year, with no clue what to write. Do I list my “top” posts (if so, do I do it by traffic or by more subjective means)? Do I list my achievements for 2011? Do I do predictions for 2012? 

I’m gonna keep it simple and thank everyone for reading. It has been a good year for me both personally and professionally, and I’m really glad I have this site as an outlet to convey some of that to others. 

Recently, some of you have noted that you’re liking the stuff I write here more than what I’ve written in the past elsewhere. I really appreciate that. To be honest, when I stepped away from fulltime duty at TechCrunch, I was a little concerned about losing my voice, as it were. Instead, I feel almost the opposite has happened. It took a little getting used to, but being able to write what I want, whenever I want without having to worry about anything else is really what it’s all about. 

And the response has been amazing. Last December, this site got about 10K visits (not to be confused with pageviews — it’s nice not having to worry about that game) — this December, this site will end the month at right around 500K visits. When you combine that with the over 60K Tumblr followers, most of whom are presumably reading the content in their main Tumblr feed, I’m blown away.

I know this site has had some substantial downtime and access issues this year (alongside Tumblr), but things are being put in place now to hopefully fix that once and for all. I appreciate the patience. 

2011 was great, 2012 will be better. Thanks again for reading and Happy New Year.