More Cash For TUMBLR - Venture Capitalists Keep Investing in a Bad Environment

I was quite surprised by the news that New York-based startup Tumblr received an additional $4.5 million investment from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Not only are we in a horrible economy in which nobody should be indiscriminately throwing good money after bad, but the business model behind Tumblr is pure insanity.

Tumblr is a business founded by David Karp, a 22-year old wonder kid (many of my friends in the New York tech community are not so impressed). The business is designed to enable users to pull together their blogs, random ideas and pictures all in one place so that those who want to tract these people's lives can easily do so.

I can only explain Tumblr and Twitter and all businesses of this genre this to the Facebook phenomenon. People are just fascinated with themselves. This is especially true of VCs who are the most self-indulgent people in the world and seem to be the only people using these products. But, for them to ever gain wide popularity, we are going to quickly need to have an enormous population of computer-savy great-grandparents strapped to their beds and eager to live vicariously through following their great-grandchildren's every fart.