But comparing Tumblr to WordPress is like comparing apples and oranges. They are completely different things.

WordPress is a publishing platform. You can host it yourself or WordPress it will host it for you. And yes, some people use Tumblr in this use case.

But the vast majority of the Tumblr engagement (traffic, page views, liking, reblogs, follows, etc), is on the Tumblr Dashboard which is their unique & native version of a social newsfeed. The Tumblr Dashboard is where you follow other Tumblr users and traffic inside the Tumblr Dashboard far exceeds (understatement) traffic to the aggregate page views to Tumblr powered sites.

It’s the reader, not the publishing tool. (via Stowe Boyd)

I find it interesting that no one has considered this in terms of the adoption of stream-based social tools, where the use of URLs is increasingly not about navigation, but of fetching. Instead of clicking on a URL to a photo in my twitter stream, my Twitter client pulls the photo and resolves it in the context of my streaming application.

One of the principles of the web of flow is the fragmentation of older, page-based media into easily streamable bits. And for that to work, each fragment has to have a unique ID, which is exactly what deep links are all about.

Holy Moses this is smart.

What is happening is the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy. Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. That’s why young people find job offers rescinded when pictures of drunken or naked pictures are discovered on their Facebook pages. Their prospective employers are judging their actions from a privacy-based attitude, in which the facets of an online self are averaged, instead of being considered as a constellation of selves. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

[...]

Some will dismiss my theorizing as a simple reprise of cultural relativism, making the case that all cultures can only be understood in their own cultural terms. I am making part of that case, in essence, by saying that the mores inherent in online social contracts are self-defined, and any individual’s participation in a specific online public does not have to be justified in a global way, any more than the cultural mores of the Berber Tuaregs need to be justified from the perspective of modern Western norms.

What strikes me as slightly off-kilter about this future is that these new publics are defined by tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Gowalla, and those tools are the bedrock for the most active social spaces.