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I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.

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Tumblr Staff: Fixing Content Attribution (Once and For All)  

Back when we launched two of Tumblr’s most unique features, reblogging and the Tumblr Bookmarklet, we devised automatic “via” links in post captions as a simple solution for attribution. Three years later, this solution has gotten us pretty far…

Huge news. Tumblr just devised a passive way to structure a whole lot of unstructured data. I’m just hoping API support for looking at source data isn’t far behind. With one, you could:

  • Build your own Stumbleupon for content outside the Tumblr sandbox.
  • Publishers could determine what bits of their content are the most engaging.
  • Visualize the data and better understand the internet as dynamic, multiple ecosystems.

But even more important than any of these possibilities, is the market possibilities attribution enables. For example, people who produce original content on Tumblr could set rates for their content. Editors or publishers could then roll their own magazines, generate a masthead of contributors, and pay all the authors with one checkout process. Tumblr could very well emerge as an iTunes for organic content, taking a small slice off the top and paying artists all the while.

Hopefully such a future is in the cards. I can’t wait to roll my own Gourmet replacement…

Source: staff

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