Tumblr has an extremely talented and creative community posting amazing content everyday. Over the last year the community has really blossomed, and amazing bits of mixed media (images, video and audio) has been collected on the site.

To close out 2008 Matt McInerney of Pixelspread launched the Tumblr Awards. The awards is a community event and will recognize the best tumblelogs of 2008 across a variety of categories.

Nominations were submitted by the Tumblr community and a number of Judges are assisting in creating the final list of nominations. This will not be a small task as over 700 nominations were submitted across 13 categories. Once the final list has been created voting for winners will be open to the community.

If you are a Tumblr user or interested in getting started check out the Tumblr Awards for information. Voting will be opening soon and the organizers can use some additional help in finding sponsors for prizes in a number of categories.

Tumblr Awards 2008 Categories:

• Overall Best Tumblelog
• Best use of reblogging
• Most Creative Use of Tumblr
• Best Group/Community
• Best Audio posts
• Best Video posts
• Best Image posts
• Best Quotes or Conversations
• Best Original Content/Editorials
• Best Tumblelog Design
• Best use of Typography
• Best Tumblr Theme Designer
• Best Free Tumblr Theme

Techcrunch and Mashable are both reporting that Tumblr has raised an additional $4.5 million in a Series B round with Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. This was a surprising announcement in these troubled times however this invest will play a critical role for the platform’s future.

Tumblr has been gaining traffic and the funding will provide additional runway. More importantly though is that similar to Twitter, Tumblr lacks any form of a business model. Along with the funding announcement, founder David Karp has announced plans to launch premium services early in 2009. There is still no word as to what these services will be, however, my hope is that they are the “big features” first hinted at in October.

From the Tumblr blog, “big features” were announced back in early October with the last interface update. Since then the team has only delivered the ability to “like” posts and a few API changes. Neither of which justify the interface overhaul.

To this point, Pownce has really been the only other player to leverage the premium business model. Upgrading a Pownce account to the pro version added the ability to store more files and provided an additional level of design customization. However, one of the benefits of using Tumblr is its flexibility. Users can already customize the HTML and add custom CSS. And honestly, with Pownce closing its doors today, I wouldn’t bet the house on that business model.

It will be interesting to see what additional features are going to be added to the mix from a platform that made its name from being simple to use and extremely customizable. It sounds as if Tumblr will be hitting the ground running in 2009 and we look forward to providing you more updates as they emerge.

On October 6th the team at Tumblr released an interface update to the Customization page. The page itself is beautiful and very clean, though several have pointed out on the Tumblr blog that it is inconsistent with the rest of the dashboard which also recently went through an interface update.

In the blog post the Tumblr team makes note that this update will allow for some big features they are about ready to launch. Only time will tell what these features are and why this interface update makes sense.

Though some may argue the point, microblogging is no longer simply a harbor for inane, random messages from one person to another. One group of users utilizing these platforms for a different purpose are writers and authors, using the short message inputs to create short stories and novels.

Writers have already put down the pen and paper in favor of their keyboard and a word processor, but microblogging makes things even easier. PSFK points out that the medium has obvious advantages for the writer just trying to find time to get thoughts down. When everyone is bombarded my media and other aspects of life 24/7, it can be difficult to find the time to write a full-length story. Where microblogging comes in is that authors can jot out pieces of their storyline right as they are thinking about it, from wherever they are.

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Tumblr is gearing up to push their biggest interface overhaul since November’s launch of Tumblr v3. This update will change nearly every piece of Tumblr’s current interface and lay the ground work for future, new functionality.

I haven’t noticed any new functionality at this time, however after a few minutes of playing with the interface a number of features jumped out at me that previously I wasn’t aware of or explored. What popped out the most is the increased focus of building a network on tumblr through follows and reblogging. In this interface, these features are now spelled out and placed in areas giving them greater exposure

tumblr v3

tumblr v4

The new interface is planned to launch in a “few weeks” and is currently accessible to Tumblr users at http://www.tumblr-beta.com/. The tumblr team is encouraging users to test out the new interface and send feedback/bug spotting to their support mailbox however we would also like to know your thoughts, so leave us your first impressions in our comments.