The death of the blog and the rise of Tumblr

Blogging or the online diary changed the way people interacted on the Internet forever. From Blogspot to Live Journal to Wordpress; people suddenly had a platform in which they could freely publish their thoughts on a public platform. These early entries were more texty in nature, often ranging from 300 - 500 words in length and full of hyperlinks. Then came Tumblr and blogging became like social networking. And also more about images. and less about text . It also offered users easier designs, the ability to share photos and the option to follow other bloggers. With this kind of flexibility it is little wonder that Tumblr is now the undisputed king of blogging platforms. Now according to XKCD blogger, Randall Munroe, the word Tumblr, could over take the word blog on Google searches. For the uninitiated XCKD is a regular online comic which has quite a fan following. The comic comes with a warning at the bottom of the page, this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)__. [caption id=“attachment_278589” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Screengrab of Tumblr”]  [/caption] According to today’s comic, one sees a graph which outlines that how the word Tumblr will out reach ‘blog’ by the end October 2012. The graph compares the two terms, ‘blog’ and Tumblr. You can check out the cartoon here.  Tumblr was started by David Karp, who is the founder and the current CEO of the company. Currently the blog generates nearly 20 billion posts per day, and has some 120 million users. Nearly every major mainstream website has felt the need to add a Tumblr share option for users and many also run their own Tumblr blogs to get more side traffic. Is Google search term an accurate measure of Tumblr’s success? Not really as TheNextWeb points out that a lot of users might go to a blog via Twitter or RSS feeds, or emails or other links. But then there’s no denying that Tumblr has grown massively. 20 billion posts is no small number. If Tumblr continues to grow at this pace, we could end saying goodbye to the word blog. Tell us which platform do you prefer to use?