Tumblr

Every few months, I take a peek at my Flickr stats.  I usually think to look at the stats when an older picture starts to receive attention.  People who regularly look at my photos aren't going to go back months and months and start commenting or favouriting old photos so I start to wonder what's up.

So while looking through my stats at what sites have referred people to my photos (and marvelling again at how many people are googling "golden border collie"), I discovered one of my pictures up on someone's Tumblr "blog".

I'm not on Tumblr.  To be honest I don't really get it or have time for it, but like any other blog-like thing, you'd think you would blog your OWN content, not someone else's (that in itself is a whole other blog post).  Although that doesn't seem to be the Tumblr mindset as there is a re-blog button where people can take your post and post it on their own Tumblr blog - essentially stealing/borrowing the original blogger's content.

The neat thing about Tumblr (or so I've discovered) is that it tracks how quickly and easily information is spread far and wide.  At the time of posting this post, my picture has 3,463 notes - which I think means 3,463 people have either "Liked" it, or reblogged it and who knows how many people have looked at it.  And as far as I can figure out from Flickr, it was originally posted on Tumblr on July 15.  Some people reblogged it from the original blogger and others have reblogged it from someone who had reblogged it first.  Tumblr keeps track of all of it.

Flickr keeps track of the number of people who look at the picture on your flickr site.  In this case, it is telling me 274 people (at the time of posting) have looked at this picture, which is a far cry from the stats on Tumblr.

Whenever you share something on-line it can literally end up anywhere.  It is amazing and frightening all at the same time.  I realize 3,463 "notes" is pretty minor. Think of those YouTube videos that get 100,000's of views. Could you imagine if it was an embarrassing or unflattering video of yourself that was going viral? Ugh. I feel sorry for those people.  It really makes you want to pay attention to what you post on-line and make sure that you aren't afraid to share it with the world because really, that is what you are doing every time you send something out on blogs, flickr, Facebook and every other social network site.