Tumblr Launched

Launched on 1 March 2007, Tumblr, founded by David Karp with lead developer Marco Arment, served as a critical place for the presentation and distribution of digital art from the mid- to late-2000s. The microblogging site served a similar function two decades ago to sites like Instagram and Twitter today. Tumblr serves as an important step in the pre-conditions for NFTs, as well as it combined with the emergence of smartphones, the iPhone having been announced two months earlier and released that June, to transform how digital media was consumed and shared. With the same iPhones but simply the more popular Instagram emerging as the distribution method of choice, we are still living with the smartphone-social-media-fication of digital art that largely began these first two months of 2007.