• NPR, Thursday, June 16, 2011 12:09 PM

As Tumblr overtakes Wordpress as the Web's go-to blog platform, NPR takes a look at company's winning strategy. "It's more almost like, you know, an email experience in a way," Tumblr's Mark Coatney tells NPR. "You'll dash off an email or do a tweet or something like that because it's quick and easy, so it's kind of taking that thinking and applying it to blogging."

Put another way, "Analysts say at the moment, among all of the competitors, Tumblr is the easiest to use," NPR writes. Tumblr also tries to differentiate itself by acting as an offline connector. The company, as NPR notes, organizes social gatherings at coffee shops and restaurants. Similar to Facebook and other social services, Tumblr lets uses directly reply to others' posts, or "reblog" them, which reposts their entry on her Tumblr page.

As one Tumblr user tells NPR: "You start to feel almost, like, rewarded for telling people your stories, and I think that's one of the things that allows you to get a bit more personal." In January, the 4-year-old site had more than 7 million individual blogs. In the past six months, the number has nearly tripled.

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