Tumblr Stealing and The Death Of Ideas
A couple of odd things have happened over the prior months. One, Tumblr has taken off as a singular application phenomenon almost unlike any I’ve ever seen in the past. Rarely does a web application pick up this many users this quickly unless it is something destined to become a core web application. Two, it’s been very noticable that Gawker, one of the most prominent blogs, has been taking quite a bit of credited and uncredited content from various Tumblr users. (I cite “uncredited content” because, given the circumstances in individual cases, it’s most likely that Gawker editors discovered the content in question from a lone Tumblr user who mentioned the concept for the first time earlier in the day) The idea I’m presenting here is not that they actually did it (or that they are fair or unfair in their attribution habits), but that they clearly CAN do it.