marclafountain.com

Francisca and I love trying new restaurants and are constantly on the lookout for them here in Richmond. I’ve heard good things about The Belvidere at Broad, which just opened recently. So, I was scoping out its website when I happened to see a logo at the bottom that looked oddly familiar. It turns out that the restaurant is on Tumblr.

I live and breathe Tumblr all day and love it. But, what I really love is when Tumblr surprises me, when I bump into it without expecting it. Pardon me while I have my giddy little moment. Also, I’m thinking we’ve found our next meetup location!

Hi, folks. I’m the Community Ambassador at Tumblr and live in Richmond, VA. I’ve seen other cites have Tumblr meetups and figure it’s time for Richmonders join in the fun!

I’m planning a Richmond Tumblr Meetup next Wednesday, September 17th at 6 p.m. at The Commercial Taphouse & Grill. Taphouse is located at 111 N. Robinson Street in The Fan. That’s on Robinson between Grove and Floyd. Everyone will be paying for their own drinks and food (unless they feel like paying for mine). I hope you’ll come out and meet some of your fellow tumbleloggers in Richmond!

I have two favors to ask of you if you live in the Richmond metro area:

• I’m sure there are Richmonders on Tumblr that I don’t know about. Please share the meetup details with them by reblogging this post or by copying and forwarding it via email. (Reblogs will have the added benefit of helping Richmonders discover each other on Tumblr.)

• If you are coming to the meetup or are likely to come, please indicate that in your reblog. And, please also indicate if you are likely bringing others with you.

Thanks and I hope to see you on the 17th!

I know almost nothing about investing and am in fact not very good at basic math. But, I’ve had an idea in my head this week and I’m trying to find out if it’s possible or if someone is actually already doing it.

While I’ve never met them, I’m a big admirer of venture capitalists, like Fred WIlson and Bijan Sabet. The list of internet start-ups they’ve invested in is really impressive. Many of them are companies whose products I love and use daily, with Tumblr being at the head of the pack.

So, I would like to invest a small bit of money in a venture fund or mutual fund that’s managed by experienced VC’s and focuses on funding internet startups. But, after a lot of Google searching, I have no idea how do that or if I even can. It seems like venture capital is a game only played by institutional investors and the very wealthy. Sadly, I am neither.

Is there a venture capital or mutual fund that aggregates small sums of money from a large number of investors to help fund the Tumblrs, Twitters, and FeedBurners of the world? If so, how do I invest?

I’ve been a loyal Apple iTunes Store music buyer for years and have never really cared that my music had DRM or that it’s in the AAC format. My music worked on my computer via iTunes, on my iPod with headphones or a speaker, on my car stereo with an iPod adapter, and on my TV via Apple TV. What more could I want?

Well, I’ve recently been enjoying listening to what people are putting on Muxtape and am loving audio on Tumblr more than ever with the new Sound Box alpha. But, I now realize that I can’t easily add my own audio to either service.

Most of my audio is DRMed AAC from the iTunes Store. So, unless I want burn CDs and re-rip tracks or use something like Audio Hijack Pro, there’s no way to convert it to an MP3 suitable for streaming on Muxtape or Tumblr. And, while the iTunes Plus audio isn’t DRMed, I would still have to use a third-party application to convert it to MP3 before being able to share it. Painful.

What got me thinking about of this was noticing that Muxtape has started letting users buy audio tracks from the Amazon MP3 Downloads store. I had never given Amazon’s online music offering a spin before today and I’m pretty impressed.

It’s not as easy-to-use or slick as the iTunes Store, but Amazon MP3 Downloads has lots to recommend it. It lets you buy high-quality, DRM-free MP3 tracks at reasonable prices in a web interface and makes it a snap to automatically import the tracks into iTunes or Windows Media Player (yuck!).

After my love affair with the Kindle, I was so enamored with Amazon that I bought its stock. (Sadly, AMZN has pretty much tanked since I got it.)  Because of its MP3 format and the lack of DRM, I may be an Amazon MP3 Downloads convert too. If Apple doesn’t cut some non-DRM deals with the other record companies soon, I’m betting a lot of people will be joining me.

I’m testing out the new Letterhead theme by Tumblr Theme Impresario Bill Israel. I like it a lot thus far. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it via email at “myfirstname AT marclafountain.com”. Thanks!

If you love Tumblr and the company that makes it, Tumblr, Inc. (formerly Davidville), do something about it! Nominate Tumblr, Inc. as the Best Consumer Startup in the 2007 Crunchies!

As much as I *love* Tumblr 3.0 and Davidville for giving it to us for free, I also have my wish list. Here are my Top 5 wishes:

1. I wish I could automatically import RSS feeds (especially Twitter) as Quotes.
2. I want the “Hide My Friend’s Posts” button back on the Dashboard. I need to be able to declutter and focus on my own content.
3. I wish Tumblr provided server space to store a favicon and a header image and an automated way of inserting those files into themes.
4. We need a better way to discover other tumbleloggers. With Radar gone, there’s no way to easily discover other tumblelogs beyond the Tumblr.com homepage (which is hard to get to get to if you’re logged in) or the comments on the Davidville blog. I know the Davidville folks are exploring forum software. But, I don’t think that’s the best way to go. Even if they integrate the forum with Tumblr’s login and design, it’s still bolting a piece of cookie-cutter external software onto what is currently a unique community. We all have Tumblelogs and access to Channels. I bet something could be done with public channels to create a unique forum or centralized comment mechanism.
5. Speaking of being able to discover things, what about a page that shows what links and and embeds are most popular on Tumblr for the day or week and who’s posting about them?