Micro-Blogging Platform Tumblr is HOT!

The popularity of the blogging website Tumblr has exploded over the past year, recently surpassing the 20.7 million blogs hosted on competing platform Wordpress.com. That's up from just 7 million Tumblr blogs in January! Experts say that Tumblr's exponential growth -- like that of Twitter -- shows that the average person wants a simple, easy-to-use, elegant platform to post image-heavy, short-form content quickly.

Wordpress.com and Google's Blogger platform allow people to create more complex and "professional"-looking sites. But their backends are much more complicated than Tumblr's and, according to many people, provide too many control options. Tumblr's ultra-simple backend, despite it's much more limited control and customization options, appeals to the average "non-geek" web user/blogger. It's the ideal platform for short, funny posts, simple photo-publishing, and easy social sharing.

We say: We love simplicity. Tumblr is awesome and we plan on using it in the near-future. Their templates look great and the email-to-post function is superb. Look for a new Vegas-focused Tumblr blog coming soon! ;)

Learn some mo': What Tumblr's Success Means For The Future Of Blogs, Twitter

Google Will Go "Real-Time" With Web Publishers

Google is about to introduce a new system that allows web publishers to instantly submit brand-new content for indexing in their search engine... as soon as the content is created (aka in "real-time"). The PubSubHubbub real-time syndication protocol (PuSH) will allow Google to index fresh content extremely quickly and provide the most up-to-date information possible to users.

The company announced yesterday at the Search Marketing Expo that they plan to provide publishers a standard way to "push" their newly created content into Google's search results, instead of having to wait for Google to crawl web links and "pull" new content into the index. We think that this new technology will revolutionize the "search" worlds, especially if other engines like Yahoo, MSN, and Ask adopt the new protocol standards!

Learn some mo': Google Index to Go Real Time