BlackBook

Much hay has been made of the news that Internet dinosaur Yahoo! Inc. will buy the blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, allowing the company’s decrepit 26-year-old founder and CEO, David Karp, to finally retire to his private island made of American Apparel models. (Just kidding, David. Please don’t delete me.) But while Tumblr users and others have expressed outrage and threatened self-exile, as if we’d just reelected George W. Bush, we didn’t know what a Yahoo!-fried Tumblr will look like. Until now. Here are some highly confidential plans we intercepted. 

Oh, now this could be fun: some well-meaning souls have taken to Tumblr to compile troubling dossiers on the culturally insensitive habits of those people you are most likely to reblog admiringly at some point: people like Amy Poehler, John Slattery and, uh, Barbara Walters? If they’re taking her sort down I can’t see why they even bothered with Dan Savage and Eminem, whose list of offenses scans like a Wikipedia page in need of a hard edit.

Likely every Tumblr user on the planet was excited by the announcement of Babblr, a Google Chrome plug-in designed to let you chat in real time with all your BBFs (Best Blog Friends). Finally, a way to waste time while you’re wasting time! So far in the rollout, however, we’ve gotten only a stream of irate posts about how the damn thing won’t function, period.

Uh, guess this wasn’t a scathing April Fool’s joke: BAM is really going to showcase a real exhibit of real GIFs, really! It’s called “Moving the Still” and I’m sure it’ll be somehow completely different from scrolling through a few days’ worth of a Tumblr dashboard, so get on it.

Want to brunch with Tumblr founder David Karp? Split an omelette with Vimeo founder Jake Lodwick? Have an espresso with the lead singer of OK Go? Yep, so do I. And maybe someday we will, but for now, we’re getting the next best thing: a video from GE’s two-hour Brilliant Brunch at SXSW, when eight leading creators of all things tech, media, & music came together to dine on waffles, sip Bloody Marys, and tackle how they got started, what challenges them, and how they stay on top.

Well, that's adorable: there's a tea blend named after a social networking site.

Two years ago, actor Adam Goldberg sat around with his girlfriend brainstorming what the next new big social media thing would be. Already a man of Tumblr and Twitter (and hesitantly of Instagram), he thought he had it: “It’s sound. It’s got to be sound.”But unless you count the collective groans of boyfriends around the world when Pinterest caught fire, Goldberg was wrong. The next big thing, two years later, is video. More accurately, it’s Vine, an iOS app allowing you to capture six looping seconds with a stop-action camera, helmed by Twitter. Less than two weeks old, the app has seen a deluge of early adopters (and a lot of porn buzz), but what might be the most interesting thing about Vine is that it’s already been won.

Today in blogs I wish I thought of: Google Street Scene mashes up scenes from popular movies ranging from Goodfellas (at left), Back to the Future, and Blue Velvet, among others, with the street view feature on Google Maps. Remember how David Lynch bitched about watching movies on "your fucking telephone"? I can't imagine he'd be too thrilled about this new artistic development. It's a good resource to find the settings of your favorite movies, at the very least. [via Gawker]

You may have noticed that there are a lot of Tumblrs out there with the exact same concept. Each starts with a notion that the blog will be about something specific—say, working in the publishing industry, or as a stripper. The posts themselves then describe common events in that line of work—say, "When a book becomes a bestseller," or, "When a customer tips with a two-dollar bill." These little conditionals are then supplemented with the same tired-ass GIFs we've been looking at for years now, as if they are any sort of punchline. So to save you some time, here are all of those blogs condensed.

Farewell, News Corp. media property The Daily, and flights of angel investors sing thee to thy rest. Your iPad-only content was too thrilling for this world. I mean, probably. I don’t have an iPad (or any comparable tablet), so how the hell would I know? I’m just assuming that anything Rupert Murdoch pours $30 million into at the outset is really going to pop.