Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.

Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!

Interesting monetization strategy. A buck for a customizable sticker.

I’m not sure how much this will help items stand out. Tumblr already gives you options to create very visual posts, with images (including animated gifs) and videos.

I guess anything you can do to stand out will help. Tumblr is getting 15 billion pageviews a month these days, so you might as well do what you can, if it’s worth it to you.

Here are the options Tumblr gives you:

To refresh your memory, she’s the 16 (now 17)-year-old former teen model and aspiring pop star that made waves last summer when she married 51-year-old Doug Hutchinson. You might know him as the actor with memorable roles on shows like The X-Files and Lost as well as the film The Green Mile.

You can probably understand why this celeb-wedding fascinated so many people. Sixteen years old is young, and 35 years is a pretty big age difference. But that wasn’t the only thing about the marriage that gave the story legs. Stodden had also made some interesting music videos as well. Plus, something about her…image…led people to the conclusion that she couldn’t possibly be 16 years old. Later investigation revealed that she was, in fact, the age she claimed to be.

Anyway, Stodden lives on as a topic of conversation partially due to her tweets, which could only be described as ………..

Honestly, adverbs and alliteration abound. For example:

So, one Tumblr user has decided to do everyone a favor and give Stodden’s tweets an artistic dimension. I present to you, the Courtney Stodden Tweets Drawn Tumblr:

The Courtney Stodden Drawn Tweets Tumblr isn’t the only place out there that appreciates her Twitter enthusiasm. There’s also a Twitter account dedicated to translating Stodden’s tweets for a wider audience:

While drawing Stodden tweets is a pretty awesome pastime, I think that they probably merit some careful hand-stitching as well.

[Via Uproxx]

Pretty impressive. In September, it was at 12.5 billion pageviews per month, according to Quantcast data. Back then, Pingdom put out some other stats: 434 posts per second, 26,000 posts per minute, 1.56 million posts per hour, 263 million posts per week, 1.1 billion posts per month, 13.7 billion posts per year.

It’s probably safe to assume that these have gone up as well.

Tumblr’s newly released numbers highlight the significance of some other stats the company shared on Friday, regarding SOPA protests:

That’s probably why Tumblr, via its staff blog, just announced that it’s increased the size limit for these to 1MB. Previously, the limit was 500KB.

Animated GIFs have been around about as long as I’ve been using the Internet, if not longer. It’s been interesting to see them kind of fade into obscurity only to see them have something of a resurgence thanks to networks like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Tumblr.

Even Conan O’Brien is using them on the Team CoCo Tumblr. So is Comedy Central. It’s interesting to see the big brands adopt this element of web culture.

LOLSlater is a great Tumblr for animated GIFs like this:

Tumblr’s traffic has been on the rise, and we can probably expect the animated GIFs to keep rolling. It looks like iPad traffic in particular has been doing quite well.

Tumblr says it has a bunch of mobile updates coming over the next few weeks.

The Tebowing pose was taken from a impromptu celebration that Tebow made after a dramatic comeback win. You’ll see the pose at about the 4 second mark. The exercise, an obvious demonstration of prayer by the outspoken Christian athlete, has become a pop culture phenomenon, largely in part to the Tumblr blog the first celebrated the motion.

Now, it looks like we’ve had our first real Tebowing controversy as four New York teens have been suspended for striking the now-famous pose in the middle of their high school hallway.

The four students (all male, three of which are football players themselves) were suspended for one day after they orchestrated a Tebowing event that involved upwards of 40 other students.

While some people are quick to jump to the conclusion that this was an anti-Tebow or more generally anti-Christian move by the school, the Principal told ABC News that it was all about safety:

“They knelt down in the hallway in between periods and made it impossible to pass,” said Principal David Wicks. “They were causing a situation that could have been unsafe. God forbid there was an accident or a fire alarm. These students had been given prior warning about similar incidents. This was not anti-Tebow, or anti-Christian.”

Check it out for yourself. This smartphone video shows the incident in question –

Tim Tebow is most a controversial sports figure, to put it bluntly, because he’s very vocal about his religion. The former Heisman winner thrust religion in sports into the spotlight through various actions – Bible verse eye black, that anti-abortion ad that ran during the superbowl, etc. The “controversy” of Tim Tebow is only made more intense by the fact that there is an ongoing debate about his actual skill and ability to play football in the NFL. When you couple that with the religion stuff, it becomes irresistible to salivating execs at ESPN.

So Tim Tebow is a highly-discussed public figure these days – and it’s partway because of his outspoken Christianity. Do you think that these suspensions had anything to do with that? Or do you think that a bunch of young kids were just blocking up the halls during a class change and the administration went a little heavy handed with the punishment? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[Lead Image "Tebowarhol, from Tebowing.com]

Since you’re about to get started on your blog any second now, Pingdom wants to help you lift-off. They’ve rated the top five blogging services so you’ll know which blogging service is the most reliable (least downtime) and which one to stay away from (most downtime) all so you can have and provide the best blogging experience ever.

The blogging services included in Pingdom’s surveyed were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr, and Posterous. Over the period of January to November of this year, they monitored each service to assess the total amount of downtime each service had. They used their own the monitoring service to test the services from multiple locations in North America and Europe. From each blogging service Pingdom monitored four different blogs to measure the amount of downtime experienced by each.

And the winner is…

Google’s blogging service, Blogger! Pingdom found that Blogger was down only a minute and a half each month. That’s some incredible reliability. I’m a human being yet I consistently have more downtime than Blogger. The service actually came out on top last year in the same study, so Google’s got some pretty good longitudinal reliability to boast of now, too.

Honorable mentions go to WordPress and Typepad, both of which had a larger sum of downtime during the study but were still under a total of two hours. With WordPress down only nine minutes per month and Typepad down ten minutes, that’s still really good and I bet you would hardly notice the outage.

So do you see who ranked the most unreliable blogging service? That’s right: Tumblr. Tumblr had a median downtime of almost four hours per month with the single longest outage observed during the study at three hours. Three hours in Internet time is, like, it might as well just be a whole month. Have you seen how impatient people get when they try to load a page and it takes more than three seconds?

As you could probably glean from the above table, Pingdom ranked the blogging services in the following order, from best to worst:

Now carry on, my wayward bloggers, and enjoy the exquisite services offered to you by Blogger. However, if you happen to have already signed up for a Tumblr account, it’s not too late to jump ship and move on to greener pastures. Especially if you’re counting on Tumblr to help you get re-elected.

They used Comic Sans.

Of course the name was blacked out and nobody could possibly know which student had committed the unforgivable act – but they knew. They laughed with the rest of the class, but inside they felt all-encompassing shame of poor font choice.

Popular opinion holds that Comic Sans is the worst typeface to ever exist. Narrowly edging Papyrus for that dubious distinction, Comic Sans is a force of nature. It can inspire so much raw hatred, allowing it to unite people around a common enemy. Folks that can’t agree on which direction the sun rises find common ground in their overwhelming disgust for Vincent Connare’s simple, comic book-inspired font.

But like almost anything universally despised, there are a few brave souls who have decided to stand in defense of the maligned font. The people of the Comic Sans Project state “we are the Comic Sans defenders. We fear no fonts and we will make the whole world Comic Sans. Because Helvetica is sooo 2011.”

The tumblr is simple. To spread Comic Sans to everything we know and love by replacing classic logos with the font. So far, they’ve managed about 10 revamps – as they’ve only been active for about a week. Here are a few of my favorites:

They say that they have received a lot of submissions, and are working on setting up a submission system soon.

I’m afraid what Hitler might have to say about the blog, however:

The people at the Comic Sans Project aren’t the first to take up the cause of the beleaguered font. This amazing animation was created based on a McSweeney’s monologue:

Why so much hatred for Comic Sans? As one YouTuber said in a response to that very question: “Because it’s shit.”

If all this Comic Sans has you feeling a little gross, might I suggest watching Helvetica as the mind’s equivalent of a long, hot shower.

[Via The Daily What]

And of course, the internet has decided that it’s perfect meme fodder.

The most indelible image from the video that went viral last week is definitely UC Davis Campus Police Lieutenant John Pike casually pepper spraying the protestors, who appear to be sitting on the ground in an absolutely peaceful manner. The few-second clip of the high-powered, red-orange spray covering the faces of the students has been played thousands of times across news outlets since last Friday.

If you somehow have yet to see the video, check it out below:

Now, the image of Lt. Pike spraying the students has spawned its own Tumblr blog, the aptly titled Pepper Spraying Cop.

Little did we know that Pepper Spraying Cop has cracked down on so many famous moments in history!! This Tumblr will help document the long pepper spraying arm of this officer of the law!

And it does just that – by inserting the pepper spraying cop into various films, works of art, and famous photographs from history. Here are some of my favorite images from the blog:

Pepper Spray Cop ruins Abbey Road shoot -

Pepper Spray Cop Grinches Cindy Lou Who:

Pepper Spray Cop at the dawn of creation:

Pepper Spray Cop makes immolation a little worse:

Reddit has joined in the Lt. Pike meme fun as well. Some pertinent street art has been spotted. Only the spray has been replaced by butterflies:

Before I could think “That’s going to be a really popular t-shirt design pretty soon,” someone on reddit already made himself the t-shirt.

Memes pop up sometimes even when the source is decidedly less than funny. But they have a way of keeping things alive, and once you become a popular meme, the memory of you or your actions takes a long time to fade.

View more daily infographic round-ups here.

Internet Marketing Infographic by Vertical Measures

Tumblr Numbers:

“Please know that we’re aware of a recent increase in blogs with odd URLs that are following large numbers of users. We’re doing everything we can to quickly suspend these blogs and to keep more of them from being created,” the message says. “As Tumblr finds and suspends these blogs, you may see that your Followers count seems incorrect for a period of time. Our Follower indexing system time to recognize that a given blog has been suspended and to then not count that suspended blog in your Followers count. We’ll update your Followers count correctly after a period of time.”

“The fact that one or more of these blogs has Followed you, Reblogged your content, or Liked your content will not compromise the security of your Tumblr account or the security of your computer in any way,” it continues. You can read the whole message here.

It does remind he user that you can always use Tumblr’s blocking mechanism:

Tumblr spam is not something we see discussed a whole lot, but apparently it’s getting worse. This isn’t much of a surprise, considering the service continues to experience tremendous growth (President Obama’s campaign even joined it this week).

Tumblr recently secured a new $85 million round of funding, bringing the total funding to $125 million. Recent reports had Tumblr at 6.5 billion monthly pageviews ,and Nielsen indicated that it has nearly tripled tis unique U.S. audience.