[META] What blogs and Twitter feeds and like things do you read?

I’m curious, and long for new things.

[LINK] Two notes on Yahoo’s work with Tumblr and Flickr

Yahoo, as any number of news media (like the Financial Post, has bought Tumblr.

Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.

Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.

Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.

Yahoo has also radically upgraded Flickr.

[T]he big news is the free space — “we want all of your images,” said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in “full quality.” Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space “other” companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.

Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. “Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful,” said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you’ll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.

As a long-time Flickr user, I’m excited by the upgrade. As a novice Tumblr user, I only hope Yahoo doesn’t screw it up (the fact that Marissa Mayer has had to promise not to do that worries me). I do find it worth noting that, between Flickr and Tumblr and my Yahoo Mail account, I make more use of my Yahoo account than I do my Google account, and that with the impending demise of Google Reader my usage of Google will diminish accordingly. I just use Google to search; I do my business on Yahoo.

Is this common, I wonder?

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams has more on the electric sail.
• Daniel Drezner is unimpressed with Niall Ferguson’s claims that he’s being unfairly criticized when the blogosphere, when the strongest online critiques have come from news services like The Atlantic and professors of various disciplines.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that astronomers looking at white dwarfs in the Hyades star cluster 150 light-years away have found their atmospheres polluted by dust from asteroids which have crashed onto their surfaces.
• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, sociologist and new homeowners Karen Sternheimer notes that investment firms have been buying up real estate. What of regular homeowners?
• Language Log’s Victor Mair notes a new site seeking to document all of the various dialects and language forms of Chinese.
• Progressive Download’s John Farrell notes the Catholic Church’s qualified support for evolution.
• Savage Minds’ Carole McGranahan argues that a properly curated Twitter account can produce numerous benefits for the academic.
• Torontoist wonders if maps of Toronto showing walking routes and times might be worthwhile.
• At Window on Eurasia, Paul Goble quotes a Russian blogger who argues that the Soviet annexation of territories in Europe after the Second World War, including the Baltic States and Moldova as well as western Ukraine and Belarus, ultimately destabilized the Soviet state.

[NON BLOG] My new Huawei U6150

As an addendum to my previous post hoping that Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion) can pull out of its ongoing death spiral, I thought–for honesty’s sake, you see–I should share the last picture I took with my Huawei U1250.

What is it?

My new Huawei U6150.

Acquired in August 2011, my old phone and my WIND Mobile provider did a good job serving my needs. When it no longer accepted voice calls, staying with my provider was a given. Staying with the Huawei line also made sense, given my generally positive experience of my phone. A QWERTY keyboard sold this model.

One era has ended; a new one has begun.

[DM] “What blogs like Demography Matters do you follow?”

I’ve a very brief post at Demography Matters asking what other demographics-related blogs DM readers read, or write. (Add them here, too.)

[URBAN NOTE] “Shit Rob Ford’s Done”

Via Torontoist’s morning roundup, I discovered the Tumblr blog Shit Rob Ford’s Done.

(“An attempt to keep track of all the shit Rob Ford has done since elected mayor,” the subtitle reads. It goes on for four pages of summaries and links.)

Go, read, share.

[URBAN NOTE] “Shit Rob Ford’s Done”

Via Torontoist’s morning roundup, I discovered the Tumblr blog Shit Rob Ford’s Done.

(“An attempt to keep track of all the shit Rob Ford has done since elected mayor,” the subtitle reads. It goes on for four pages of summaries and links.)

Go, read, share.

[META] Semagic cross-post test

Test.

[META] Testing crossposting

Test, test, 1 2 3 test.

[META] rfmcdonald at Dreamwidth

A Bit More Detail is now online at Dreamwidth, username rfmcdonald. My thanks to springheel_jack for the gift of a startup code. Please follow me there.

At present, Dreamwidth is importing my information. The entries and comments will take a while–in doing its backup, Semagic told me that there were eleven thousand entries and three times as many comments–but they’ll get there.