Many Tumblr users call themselves “curators,” so it seems only natural that Tumblr has launched its own curation effort with Storyboard. In a video posted on the new site, Tumblr’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Mohney described Storyboard as an effort to highlight content the average Tumblr user might not discover “through their natural organic reading of Tumblr.”
The first posts highlight content from celebrities (Michael Stipe), photography from Afghanistan and a fascinating piece about the New York Times‘s “morgue,” authored by Tumblr’s Executive Editor, Jessica Bennett.
Storyboard editors insist any Tumblr user’s content is eligible to show up on the blog:
There’s never enough time or space to tell every story, but there are many ways to tell it. If you’re interested in submitting a story or story idea to Storyboard, just create a Tumblr post with the #storyboard tag. Our editors will read them all — liking, replying, reblogging, or promoting the cool, creative, and compelling stuff. And if the story seems really good, we may ask to tell it here.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity for Tumblr to further engage its user base in a classically “Tumblr-y” way, as long as they ensure they Facebook and tweet the links so the curated content has maximum opportunity to eventually be reblogged back onto Tumblr again as if it were never posted there in the first place.
