general

Adam Rifkin (techcrunch) tells us some things we already know about Tumblr:

ONE

Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.

But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.

TWO

For [entertaining memes and porn] the fact that Tumblr offers full animated gif support is crucial as a differentiator from the static environs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Pinterest. Ten seconds of reaction shot — or sex act — make a big difference in expressive power. Also, gifs are far easier to view on mobile devices than video, and so far the big content owners have made little effort to stamp them out via DMCA. [assuming the mobile device supports GIFs --tm]

THREE

Tumblr is not replacing Facebook; it’s merely siphoning off some authentic liking and sharing, especially among young Americans. Facebook needs to exist because it’s holding down the Mom, siblings, and lame friends part of a person’s social life — the “public-private” life, if you will. As long as Mom sees you on Facebook occasionally, she isn’t going to think to look for you on another site… which paradoxically frees young users to act out on a stage that seems more private to them despite being on the open web.

"Mom, siblings, and lame friends" -- not Glitch artists, not social media artists. Please note.
Rifkin does conclude -- ominously -- that the still-not-monetizable Tumblr is working on its own "Graph," so enjoy your obscurity while you can.
And let's also note the glaring contradiction in Rifkin's statement that "people quit blogging because they can’t find and develop an audience" and Tumblr's growth occurring because "a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience."

Got a last-minute invite from one of the panelists to the Meetup event below but didn't show up.

Social Media, Art & The "Like" Economy

How do we value art online? In a setting that privileges and rewards content with mass appeal and a meme-ready aesthetic, how does the creative practice of artists working on the internet conform to or defy these rules? In the absence of a true art market for net art, new media art, or art that takes place on social media platforms, does a work's viral potential become an indicator of success or quality?

In this moderated panel discussion we'll hear from artists, curators, and art critics who are looking at the way art functions in the digital gallery of the internet. We'll be exploring whether success online can translate to success offline, and exactly how much stock one should place in the "Like" economy of the web.

Let's answer the question in the first paragraph with a descending scale of priorities. Instead of art let's use the term expression and the term "art" as expression appreciated as art:
1. The expression generates interesting and cogent discussion.
2. It's recognized by an institution tasked with recognizing art.
3. It "goes viral" (but becomes "valuable" only when it leads to 1. or 2. above).
4. It acquires likes, faves, or other means of tabulating responses (but see 3. above).
5. Somewhere near the bottom: The expression is made by someone previously valued or validated as an artist (through the process of 1. and 2.)
6. Anything having to do with sales, the market, or money. In an ideal world that happens after a consensus is reached via 1.-5.)

[edited]

Manuel Fernández sent a very nice email regarding the previous post on his GIF series. While it's polite and complimentary, he has a couple of issues:

But I think that the text [discusses] if these gifs are fake. I just wanted to clarify it. The text of the project says: "The project uses the face recognition software as pretext to generate a series of animated gif images emulating the process." [Also,] the project does not talk about ubiquity of surveillance.

Reply:

Thanks, Manuel.
I did read your statement before I posted and linked to it. What I wrote is interpretation.
Face-recognition-as-surveillance is a "hot button" issue it would be hard to ignore. I'd be derelict if I didn't at least mention it.
The point of the post was I don't care that much about art's relation to hot button issues but I liked the GIFs for other reasons.
What I hadn't considered before the update was that the green rectangle was instantly recognizable code for a particular product, since I'm not an iPhone user myself and kind of hate them. That is much more problematic to me -- the extent to which your GIFs are an in-joke for iPhone users and therefore a subtle form of brand promotion.
In my own work I make jokes about primitive paint programs but when I first started doing that I thought the pixelly drawings could be read as either MacPaint (Apple/Claris) or Microsoft Paintbrush. Mostly they were (seen as generic) and I was very uncomfortable the first time a gallery described them as "Microsoft Paintbrush drawings" (this was around '98).
Nowadays MSPaint has become synonymous with pixelly paint programs (even though they are changing it), people have forgotten MacPaint from the '80s, and I've even been accused of "loving Windows." Yipe, that's insane.

Another quote from that HuffPo Live panel about Facebook Graph Search. The topic was whether there could be a life after Facebook (laughable if you never signed up), meaning, was it possible that all the changes of privacy policy could force a mass exodus a la MySpace. As mentioned earlier, panelist Barry Hoggard is a New York art collector who also has an artist webhosting business and has been a close observer of tech changes during the last 10 years of transition from the blogosphere to the social media era, so he knows what of he speaks:

I've seen some interesting evolution of the way artists and other cultural producers have used Facebook. For a long time I was seeing a move away from individual, private websites. Artists were starting to use Facebook as if it were their new website: it's where they blogged, it's where they put up images of new works. But once they started to get worried about how Facebook could use those images, and when there are rumors about things like what it actually means or you're granting the license for Facebook to use a given image, then suddenly I started seeing artists' sites really lock things down. So artists who had moved almost everything to Facebook and weren't updating their other sites, like their blogs or their personal portfolio sites, suddenly locked down so much that I didn't have a good way to look at what kind of work they were doing now.

None of the other panelists responded to this because (i) what are artists? and (ii) Hoggard left Facebook in 2010 and therefore is a Dead Man like Johnny Depp in the Jarmusch film. But let's follow up and say yeah, what are artists if not the antennae of the race or at the very least trendspotters? Their behavior vis a vis presenting themselves and their work might have a small amount of relevance. Yours truly never joined because Facebook seemed a much less flexible and attractive means of presenting work than what I had on my BLOG. According to some, that was the mistake of the century, but then, I never found myself in the predicament of waking up one day feeling stranded in a world not of my own making, surrounded by stalkers and faux friends, with all my art and writing on servers run by Machiavellian data leeches.

Buzzfeed, which was started in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a founder of The Huffington Post, operates on the philosophy that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are America’s new front pages and that the content people view online is determined more by what their friends share than what is found on the home page of a news organization. As such, the distinction between Web ephemera like baby videos and traditional journalism has all but disappeared.

(Douglas Quenqua, NYT, Feb 15, 2013)

These has to be some middle ground between Quenqua's sneering description and BuzzFeed's airhead premise. "Bloggers as citizen journalists" has a quaint ring, now, but an RSS reader stocked with skeptical long-form blogs* (that link to other sources but also digest them) is still an excellent way to get news and opinion. This can be supplemented by a catch-all service such as Google News to see what a wider spectrum considers newsworthy. But we can perhaps all agree that New York Times editors have lost our respect as news gatherers and agenda setters, after Iraq, the Eliot Spitzer takedown ("ties to organized crime," they said), Adam Davidson, etc.

*e.g., Juan Cole, Naked Capitalism, Lobelog, The Big Picture