The news of the pending deal was first reported by AllThingsD and later Adweek reported rumors of their deal as well. At least a couple of our own sources say that the talks are serious. We have also learned that the deal is being championed by CEO Mayer, who according to Kara Swisher, has met with the team from Tumblr. We have learned that Yahoo’s New York-based corporate development team is leading the process, though like all deals, talks could fall apart. (We have reached out to the respective parties for their comments, but so far we have not heard back from them. We are going to update the post to reflect their responses.)

Tumblr says it has nearly 108 million blogs, over 50 billion posts and it is said to have 117 million visitors a month according to comScore. Forbes.com reports that Tumblr made $13 million in 2012 and is looking to bring in about $100 million, thanks to its new advertising initiatives. The company also recently introduced mobile advertising. For Yahoo this could be a much needed foray into mobile advertising and also into pushing new native ad-formats that help diversify its ad business away from the usual web advertising.

Valley calls Karp

David Karp, one of the co-founders and chief executive of Tumblr, has been seen around in Silicon Valley. Tumblr has been trying to raise a new round of funding, but it’s slower than expected revenue ramp has acted as a dampener for the fundraising efforts. Tumblr has raised a total of $125 million and is rumored to be valued at $800 million. Tumblr investors include Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Ventures.

But Yahoo may not be alone in courting Tumblr. In November 2012, my colleague Mathew Ingram argued that Facebook and Tumblr should poke each other. Surprise surprise, it is something that is nagging Yahoo bigwigs.

Facebook in the mix?

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

One question is why wouldn’t Google want Tumblr? After all, it would mean young people on a social network that could feed into Google+ — sort of like how Blogger fed pages into Google. I am guessing given its ownership of Google+ and Blogger, Google might meet some resistance from the Department of Justice. Still, as our sources pointed out, Yahoo knows the challenges in the competitive landscape and is trying to move very fast. The speed would perhaps mean that the company could short circuit the due-diligence process and overlook Tumblr’s challenges with content of questionable provenance.

Money Talks

The good news for Tumblr and its backers: Mayer will soon be super flush with cash. According to a recent Yahoo 10-Q filing, the value of Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba has gone up substantially as Alibaba’s continues to grow its revenues at a healthy clip. Yahoo owns about 23 percent of Alibaba and the Chinese eCommerce company is likely to go public and could worth as much as $100 billion in its post-IPO avatar. Yahoo is expected to sell about half its stake in the Chinese company in the likely 2014 IPO. Wall Street currently values Alibaba at around $70 billion.

In the end the question that remains: is Tumblr the fountain of youth that Yahoo badly needs or will this be a case of a pathetic middle aged guy hanging with youngsters, trying to be hip. Either way, Tumblr founders and backers could laugh all the way to the bank.

PS: Read this teenager’s response to a question on Quora, “How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr?”

Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

Getty Images

If I ever run into New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (unlikely as it might be) I will sure as hell let her know that she is absolutely right to be excited about what her paper did with Snow Fall, which in my opinion was one of the first truly post-tablet storytelling experiences. At the Wired Business conference in New York earlier this week, Abramson said:

“Snow Fall” is now a verb.  “Everyone wants to snowfall now, every day, all desks,” she said. Reporters are waiting for time to “Snow Fall” their bigger story.  She said that the story originated from the sports desk — and took “months and months and months” of time —  but Snow Fall-type projects can come from anywhere.

Snow Fall, in case you missed it, was a multimedia project that included a gripping six-part story by John Branch, one of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writers who was intrigued by the growing number of skiing fatalities. The stories were presented with interactive graphics, videos and bios of various snowboarders and skiers. It is brilliance personified and was rewarded with 2.9 million visits and 3.5 million page views within the first six days after publication. (The Times doesn’t reveal the total traffic it received since its release in December 2012.)

Snow Fall (and other such attempts) represent a great opportunity and the future for news organizations like The New York Times, especially as they are right now in a losing battle for attention with upstart competitors that include everyone from BuzzFeed to The Huffington Post. If you are the New York Times management, it is time to take a gamble: spend $25 million on creating 100 Snow Fall-like projects.

Money for something and clicks for free

In fact, it is important that our media brethren at the Times think even bigger than that, eventhough it would also mean taking a more prosaic, mercantile and business-like perspective to what they do.

They need to NOT think about Snow Fall as an add-on — as something that makes traditional content more web- or mobile/tablet-friendly — and instead treat it as a brand-new kind of media product that is created especially for the multiple device/many-screen world.

I have been involved with online publishing for a very long time — 18 years to be exact. And in that time I have seen the incumbent media make the same mistake again and again. They’ve often tried to adapt the content they’ve created for newspapers and magazines to the online world. And when they did embrace online, even then the online reporters were asked to do the same thing they did for the newspapers or the magazines.  (The Times, to its credit, published Snow Fall first online, and then in print three days later, which suggests it had a pretty clear understanding of the digital potential of a project like this.)

Yes Dorothy, the Internet is different

The internet is and will always be an immersive, interactive and communal platform. Many publishers continue to treat it like the old two-dimensional medium. Every time we have some major news events, such as the recent Boston tragedy, the social web brings the consumers of content into our newsrooms and makes them part of the process. It is one of the reasons why most of the big media still don’t get blogs. Sure, some writers like David Carr or Paul Krugman are an exception, but look at some of the Times blogs and you see they are just news stories (or features) retrofitted for the blog medium.

Federal agents descend on the home of a suspect-at-large in the Boston Marathon bombing. Getty Images

Blogging is a way of editing the world and presenting it to my community, and that means everything from photos, links, tweets and videos, in addition to sharing my raw thoughts and fully packaged features, scoops and even basic news. Every act of sharing tells you what I am interested in and what I am willing to learn and talk about.

There is a failure in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. It was one of the many reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily failed to impress me. It didn’t really invent a new form of storytelling for the tablet.

Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism — one that doesn’t sacrifice the best of our profession, but takes it by the scruff of its neck, and drags its bloated, aging body into the new world and revives it with a shot of adrenaline.

Mr. Excel meets Ms. Editor

Getty Images

However, that is only part of the story. The trick is not to get married to just the oohs-and-aahs of the Snow Fall, but to think of it as a business opportunity, much like the way Hollywood studios creatively monetize their blockbusters. My question is why can’t newspapers and magazine companies take the same approach and build a business model that actually factors in various opportunities that something like Snow Fall can offer?

So instead of starting with a newspaper story and adapting it to different formats, the Times should start with the Snow Fall. If you look at Snow Fall closely, you can see a cohesive approach to content, one that adapts and morphs to not only the medium of access, but to diverse business models — much like the movies.

From my own experience at magazines, I can tell you producing features isn’t cheap and can easily cost tens of thousand dollars, depending on the publication. The longer the lead time and higher the profile of the story, the bigger the costs. So from that perspective, spending some more on the post-tablet version of the feature shouldn’t break the bank.

The current editorial effort is to create something for a day or two of attention in the newspaper and hopefully for tens of thousands of pageviews. Why not start with the apps and e-readers (both paid), then follow up with the web version and then get to the newspaper. While apps and selling e-reader-oriented content might involve the Times learning new tricks, the company doesn’t need to change much for the latter two channels.

Blame my enteprenurial tendencies, but when I was experiencing Snow Fall, all I could see was stunning brand-advertising opportunities, that went beyond the dumb, commoditized advertising the Times is forced to put on its website. Why not embed a tasteful Land Rover ad or throw in one for Moncler? That is native advertising that actually allows organziations like the Times to live by their ethos and maintain the fidelity of their brand.

Hollywood, Baby

Now, let me explain why the Times can do it. And for that I will point to Hollywood again. One of the reasons why Hollywood studios succeed with the multi-tier approach to their “product” is because they do their best to ensure that they create an optimum experience. And they can do that with the right story, the right stars, the right production values and, most importantly, they have distribution. And gobs of money.

The Times and other big media companies have a lot of those same capabilities. They have great stars (real people, for god sake, are better stars than anything Hollywood can produce — see the Cleveland samaritan), they have great storytellers (editors and reporters, whose Pulitzers are testimony enough) and they have the ability to create the right production values (photographers, visual artists and designers). The Times also has a big audience – 35 million monthly visitors to their website in the U.S. alone, according to comScore – which means it has a lot of attention, which can be channeled effectively to promote new concepts.

Distribution Matters

Just as blockbuster movies get a lot of attention from media, Snow Fall got a lot of attention from the rest of the media community. Those millions of monthly visitors and lots of advertising space on print means distribution isn’t really a problem. And despite the financial headwinds, many of them — including the Times — still have a lot of money to try and finance a few dozen Snow Falls.

It isn’t clear how much money the Times spent on Snow Fall, but let’s just assume it was a small fortune. (Yes, I asked them and got this response: “We can’t disclose details about costs. Really, this is a newsroom effort. The business side works with the newsroom, of course, to provide the infrastructure and technology they need to tell stories in innovative ways.”)

And in exchange, it got a few million page views, but I am guessing they also built a nice backend infrastructure to create more such projects. As a result, the next Snow Fall is going to cost less, with most future spending going to the creative: words, photos, other multimedia elements and design.

So what will the Times (or someone like them) need to get it done? Simply put, a departure from the incumbent thinking, embracing today’s reality and re-imagining the work flow of a big city newspaper. In other words:

• Re-imagining its business model to factor in the reality of today’s world and forget the legacy of newsprint.
• Create a new breed of “producer” who can switch between Excel and content.
• Create a whole new breed of a journalist — one who has old-school values but also the ability to tell a story that works in many mediums of today.
• Build an editorial creative machine that works differently from a print-centric editorial group.

Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is their stock in trade. If the New York Times management were feeling bold, it would put $25 million to work on creating 100 other Snow Falls and basically change the reader’s expectations of what long-form digital content and journalism are in the new century.

So if you want to fight BuzzFeed and HuffPo, there you go, Jill!

Everyone has a device, sometimes multiple devices. It’s been a long time since we have had this rate of change—it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago. To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus—otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact. So today we’re announcing some more closures, bringing the total to 70 features or services closed since our spring cleaning began in 2011

The other projects that are being euthanized include Google Voice for Blackberry, Calendar API, Snapseed for desktop, Search API for shopping and others. However, it is the loss of Google Reader that is going to impact a lot of people — especially those of us who actually love using RSS feeds to plow through hundreds of feeds. I use it in combination with Reeder app on my iPad, iPhone and Macbook Pro to stay on top of the technology world.

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

I take issue with Urs’ comments about usage declining. It declined because the company put no resources into the product and took away social features that made it useful for many. It was a project that was orphaned because it didn’t fit into Google’s vision of a machine-driven reading experience. Despite minimal resources devoted to it, Google Reader was one of the better apps built by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

It is probably my second-most used Google service — after GMail — and I have always been befuddled by Google’s lack of desire to make Google Reader into a bigger reading platform. It could and it still can evolve into a Flipboard type service, but that would mean that Google would have to put resources and some real creative thought into Reader.

I wish they would reconsider this decision or, better yet, release the project into the open-source community so that someone can build a follow-on product.

Update: Folks from Feed.ly are offering an option for all of us left at the altar by Google’s decisions.

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandie back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

A Feedly spokesperson tells us:

Our goal is to have the API be identical to the Google Reader un-official API. So any client which plugs in to the API should be to easily migrate to Normandy. There are just a few things around authentication and ordering of categories and feeds which might be different.

Over past few days I have been dealing with a flu-gone-wild. It is not exactly the way I wanted to spend my days, but sometimes cold happens. The good news, if there can be any, is that I had a lot of time on my hands to watch a lot of video. In my case it is usually one of the four shows: Wallander, Sherlock Holmes (with Jeremy Brett), Poirot and House M.D. It is mostly House MD, because well, I am a House MD junkie.

As luck would have it, I was watching season one (for probably the 25th time) and came across  probably my favorite episode — DNR– where John Henry Giles, a saxophonist, falls sick. He goes to the hospital. There is a lot of drama, and somewhere along the way he tells Dr. House:

The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever. That’s because they don’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. I got music, you got this. The thing you think about all the time, the thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else.

One Thing

When I look back at my own life as a writer, I somehow related to that “one thing” theory. Sometimes I wonder if that is my curse. But mostly I think of it as my blessing. Thinking, obsessing, composing — writing it all down on crevices of my brain before putting it to paper (or computer.) There are days when I fall asleep thinking about a story, only to find the entire story appearing magically which I am asleep and getting up in the middle of the night and writing it all down on a piece of paper that always is next to my bed. It is a process that is all-consuming.

It is that “one thing” that made me read and re-read magazines, books and anything I could get my hands of in the 1980s India and learn how to write. Not just write, but think and write and write. It mattered to me more than anything — love, family, home and even my own identity.

I didn’t do it because I thought I would make some money or get paid to do it. Thirty-five years later, I still do it because I don’t really have a choice, because I don’t really know any other way. Writing, painting, creating –creators don’t do it because they want to make money. Creativity is not a profession, it is a gift. It was, is and always will be a very selfish act.

And the reason why I bring this up is because of the raging debate around writers, freelancers and how they are getting paid. I am bringing this up because of all the handwringing about the changing landscape. When I see all the arguments — whether it is Nate Thayer’s story about The Atlantic editor asking him to write for free in exchange for exposure, or The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal’s story of being a digital editor/writer or Felix Salmon’s unvarnished truth about the problems of online journalism – I empathize with each and every one of them. (My colleague Mathew Ingram has his nuanced take on the situation, and is worth reading.)

End of freelance?

Why? Because I sat on all four sides of this table. I have been an unpaid freelancer. I was a mistreated poorly paid staffer. And I was also employed by a magazine that was gorging at the dot-com orgy. And thanks to a lucky set of circumstances, I have been an employer. I have written for the paper and I have written for digital. I have been paid and I have been the payer. I have been a writer and a businessman.

What my changing roles have made me aware of is the reality of today’s media business (something we’ll be talking about at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York). Back in the day when it was an all- print business, the newspapers were always looking for ways to fill pages to support more advertising. More advertising meant more broadsheets to fill and more money to spend on whatever went next to advertising.

Magazines charged a heck-of-a-lot more money than papers. The more ads they sold, the more money they doled out to the writers. If I remember, one of the Red Herring issues in 2000 put Bride magazine to shame. It was full of so many ads that I had to work on four stories for the issue — just to support the advertising. I was not privy to the freelance budget but the freelancers at Red Herring were getting paid quite handsomely. Then, advertising vanished and so did the freelance money and eventually the publications themselves.

In other words, the spending on editorial was in direct correlation with the advertising dollars. Today, the ad dollars are hard to find, both in print and on the web. Sure, more dollars are being shoveled towards online properties, but then there are more zebras around this pond. Media publications are fighting with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon for ad dollars. But, then you knew that already.

Frankly, it sucks. Not just sucks, it royally sucks. It boils my blood just thinking about the changes — but change it is and one has to live with it. And that is the biggest reality of our times.  Maybe the reality of this post-blogging, post-Twitter world where words exist for mere minutes, freelance writing isn’t an option anymore. As Felix Salmon so eloquently writes:

The lesson here, then, is not that digital journalism doesn’t pay. It does pay, and often it pays better than print journalism. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to earn money in digital journalism, you’re probably going to have to get a full-time job somewhere.

My personal view, shaped by the my own experience, is that if you are going to take freelance contributions, then pay something — just as a sign of respect (if not the true worth) of a writer’s capability.

We have used freelance writers in the past and have always paid them — not a lot because we didn’t have a lot — but then we came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense in today’s always-on, constantly updating media ecosystem. We tried the monthly contract model but in the end decided that we want to adopt an in-house model. Today we have a few guest writers who write because of their love of our site and they do it for free. But we are still a team of our own.

Brave old (new) world

The reasons are actually pretty simple. Our roots are in blogging and we have a certain view of the world. In order to keep a consistent voice (not editorial style), we need to have a team that has an ability to look at the world through the same lens. That identifies us to our community of readers and it also helps us stay true to who we are and what we believe in. And most importantly it allows us to build a metabolic rate that suits us and create products that make sense to us.

We know that advertising isn’t the golden gateway, so we decided to go the way of paid content via our research business. And because we don’t put all our eggs in advertising, it means that we don’t have to be beholden to the heroin of page views and pray at the temple of traffic.  Others chose to do things differently — but we have decided to go down a different path.

Tomorrow, if they take everything away from me — the company, the job, the fame, the money — and leave me with a piece of paper. I know I will be 15 again, I will still write. And I still will have a reason to live. Just like Nate, Alexis, Felix and every other writer who gets up every morning to do that one thing… just one thing.

Kickstarter is slowly and surely becoming a major force in the film business, something I noted in my post earlier this year. The Inocente win comes close on the heels of Kickstarter-backed films taking center stage at the Sundance Film Festival. According to Kickstarter, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And in 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects in 2012.

When I interviewed Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen last year, I asked him if Kickstarter could perhaps upend the institutional control of the creative industries. Here is what he said:

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history….any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way.

Looks like fox is in the henhouse.

I tried to help answer that question in my post from last year: Amplification and the changing role of media. The gist of that post was that “as more sources of news start to go direct by posting their thoughts to their blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages, a journalist’s role becomes more about deciding what to amplify and what to ignore.”

…the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made a choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report.

The big media outlets still have one thing that they can leverage: attention. By leveraging that attention and highlighting things worth highlighting, they can continue to bring the news to their constituents and at the same time add veracity to it — and thereby add the kind of value that makes them worth keeping around.

Kilar had spent a lot of time next to Amazon’s maverick CEO Jeff Bezos and he learned well from the master of disruption. Like Bezos, he focused on playing the long game and ignored the naysayers.

He used his rolodex to hire the right people. He went to China and acquired a piece of technology to roll out Hulu to the masses at a breakneck speed. Most importantly, the team at Hulu built a simple, elegant and easy to use a minimalistic service: which no one expected. It was so good and I was so wrong. And glad I was, for when I was recovering from my illness in 2008, Hulu became a constant bedside companion.

There are some in Silicon Valley who ask me why I am a fan of Kilar. Here is why:

• Hollywood is about profit maximization even at the expense of paying public.
• Silicon Valley is about building a great consumer experience and build profits in the long term. Google and Amazon are two perfect examples.

Jason was able to marry both those constituencies. Don’t believe me? Just look at the site’s financial performance: at the end of 2012 it had three million Hulu plus subscribers and about $695 million in revenue. The number of paying subscribers for Hulu Japan tripled in comparison to 2011.

With so much good news, it perhaps was the right time for Kilar to announce that he is going to be leaving the company sometime during the first quarter of 2013. It is not as big a shock for his departure has been rumored for a while, especially since the company’s big media owners recently completed a buyout of co-owner Providence Equity. Hulu’s co-owners including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney and News Corp., have been plotting the future without Kilar.

Herding cats

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar with former CTO Eric Feng

Many of my sources have told me that Kilar was more like a UN peacemaker and trying to organize board meetings with the media-doyens was a nightmare. A Fast Company profile last year pointed out that Kilar had skills to manage up. But things went progressively south after the exit of Peter Chernin, the News Corp. COO who was the heavy on the board and who loved the concept of Hulu. That Kilar survived and helped turn Hulu into a business that 3-million people want to pay for is a testimony to his (and his team’s) skills.

My initial skepticism of this big consortium came from years of observing such beasts of burden trample over saplings of innovation, mostly because the new way threatened their established business practices. At the turn of the century, a Silicon Valley company called @Home Networks had a bold idea: send broadband via cables owned by cable networks. The idea was backed by the likes of John Doerr and soon all big cable companies such as Tele-Communications Inc. (later acquired by AT&T, which was in turn gulped by Comcast) became investors in @Home Networks.

While @Home suffered from adult management, it was the cable companies which essentially killed the pioneer. Once they learned that they could buffer their profits by selling broadband, they proceeded to kill the baby they had helped birth.

Show must go on

Having seen that movie before, I knew that Hulu would have similar problems. With Jason gone and private equity investors having locked in their profits, get ready for the egotistical media companies get their evil way with Hulu.

Kilar will leave Hulu at an interesting juncture. The rise of multiscreen households has turned the video business on its head. The relevance of the older media distribution channels is on the wane and we are transitioning to broadband and web. Think about it this way: world’s biggest live event didn’t happen on ESPN, Fox or NBC. Instead it was YouTube that hosted the Felix Baumgartner’s space jump. South Korean pop star Psy has had a billion views on YouTube. I bet you the top 100 artists have not received that kind of attention on MTV.

The fact is that we are looking at a world where Netflix and Amazon Prime along with YouTube are the cynosure of attention when it comes to video. Hulu has it for now, but its big media owners have their legacy businesses to protect. They need to make the TV station owners happy. They need to fleece the cable customers by selling them packages no one wants.

Hulu was their bridge to the future — but large media companies suffer from a weird kind of astigmatism.  They are businesses set up to serve other businesses — movie theaters, cable companies, satellite companies, DVD sellers and now on-demand video providers. That is why they can’t put viewers first, even if they want to.

Too bad, Kilar isn’t going to be there to look out for viewing public.

David Karp, CEO of Tumblr with his new iPad Mini

David Karp is the co-founder and chief executive officer of New York City-based social sharing platform, Tumblr. He was speaking speakers at our second RoadMap conference held earlier this month, where he discussed the future of his company, creativity and sharing with my colleague Mathew Ingram.

I remember meeting Karp days before he launched and it was amazing to hear that Tumblr now has 120 people. It is clocking 20 billion page views a month, has about 80.8 million blogs and over 35.7 billion total posts and gets about 165 million unique visitors every month. In between various on-stage duties, I got a chance to catch up with David and here are some notes from our conversation, mostly scribbled on my scratch pad.

Tumblr’s role in the social ecosystem

If you look at Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, you can see they are all focused on helping you find things. Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr are about helping people create things. So far, there has been a lot of emphasis on a social web that allows you to find and share things. With the new mobile hardware platforms and an app-driven creative open system, it means that we are going to see a lot more focus on platforms that help you create.

Big web companies – Facebook, Twitter, and Google are not going to put a lot of emphasis on creating. Tumblr is helping discover creators like One Direction. Just like YouTube helped create Justin Beiber.

Instagram shows you how to create good photos and share them. It is not really publishing. Tumblr is not about publishers, but it is more about creators. Classic blogging has roots in publishing.

Tumblr’s Mobile Challenge

Like pretty much every web company, the big question we wrestle with is that as mobile hardware becomes more powerful, we are forced to think about the future of websites. It is pretty clear they are less important on mobile platforms. Tumblr is focusing on mobile apps. One of the things we know is that nearly 75 percent of traffic on Tumblr is to our dashboard. So it is a top priority to make that experience beautiful on Tumblr.

[Tumblr recently upgraded its iOS app with a simplified and an elegant interface that makes it easy for folks to create from their phones. The company will continue to develop  mobile apps for multiple mobile platforms. - Ed.]

On iPad Mini

I am over laptops and the posture that comes with them. I am coding a lot less, so I use my computers a lot less. I still want to simplify even further and carry just one device. So, I want to try the iPad Mini with cellular antenna as my only device and as a phone replacement, and use Skype and/or Google Voice instead.

On his role at the company & how it has changed

I have great investors and great mentors and four years ago I listened to them a lot, because it was all new to me. I feel more confident four years later. I have not committed any code for a year, and instead I focus on giving feedback to the team in a constructive way. My role has changed from being a product director to chief motivator. I try and keep the team focused on positive things.

Most important lesson learnt

One of the big lessons I have learned as a Founder and/or CEO is that you can’t waffle or not be focused, because it weakens productivity. It defocuses the team, because they take cues from you. I have gotten better at focusing and staying on target.

Here’s Karp in conversation with Mathew Ingram at RoadMap:

Seconds after Dorsey and Zuckerberg put up their news, it was picked up by casual readers who shared it and tweeted it. Technology media (including blogs) also picked up the news and published it as classic news posts. Some of us added analysis, but in the end both casual observers and publications were doing the same job — they were amplifying the news, spreading it across various mediums. There is a blurring of the line between what is news and what is a tweet, photo or a blog post. In other words, it is a kind of mosh pit of data and information — and that means the role of media is changing.

A reporter’s job for the longest time has been to find information and report it. This is what we have called news. Sitting in the media box at the baseball stadium and reporting scores and providing updates for a wire service was as much “news” as reporting on the Watergate scandal. And up until the end of the 20th century, the sources of distribution were pretty limited — radio, newspapers, magazines and television.

That in turn meant that newsmakers had to go to media outlets in order to share their message and get it amplified and reach those they wanted to reach — call them constituents or the target audience. With the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report. The easy thing is to share or reblog everything, but by being deliberate about it, we are essentially “editing” and telling the world: “this is how I see the world/this particular beat.”

One of the few people who has it figured out is John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who essentially has a very Gruberesque-view of the Apple economy. Similarly Jason Hirschhorn (formerly of SlingBox, MySpace and MTV), who operates the MediaReDefined email newsletter and a Flipboard channel, presents a very nuanced view of media industry by sharing what he thinks is relevant. They are not classical media people, but they are probably more prototypical of the “future media.”

Andrew Sullivan, a career journalist, is one media person whose link sharing, blogging and actual writings are pretty consistent with his world view and what he considers is important news. When Sullivan writes a longer report or a deeper analysis, you know it is important and worth paying attention. When Gruber has gone deeper, it has more than likely been worth paying attention to, whether you agree or disagree with them.

I am not saying we all have to be like them, but it is important to remember that in the future when Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Hastings are no longer an anomaly, the media person’s role is no longer just reporting news. Reporting through sharing and curation are going to be vital roles for us to play in the future.