Puns, goths and memes: 10 Tumblrs you have to read

Now that calm has been returned to the blogosphere, after Tumblr’s recent six-hour outage, we thought this would be a good time to take a peek at some of the most popular sites on the microblogging-slash-social networking site.

Sitting somewhere at the intersection of Facebook, Twitter and WordPress, the five-and-a-half year old site currently boasts 79-million blogs and almost 35-billion posts. At time of writing, 9.5 million posts had been published on this day alone.

Towards the end of the last year, Tumblr received US$85-million in funding from existing investors and new investors, which include Richard Branson.

Tumblr.com has a global Alexa ranking of 36 — in other words it is the 36th most popular website in the world — and a US ranking of 19. It was also home to Barack Obama’s first online presence as well as the source of memes including “We are the 99%”, which became a slogan for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

So how does one go about highlighting the most popular Tumblr sites with almost 80-million of the things in existence? You turn to the internet, naturally. And if that doesn’t work, you crowdsource — so if this list is missing any of your favourites, let us know in the comments.

Mashable’s 25 Tumblrs that will make you LOL include:

• The groan-worthy Are We Having Pun Yet
• The disappointed Depressed Copywriter
• The mind-boggling WTF QR Codes
• The “it’s got cats in it” The Kitten Covers (very clever as well as cute)
• And the frankly bizarre Goths Up Trees, dedicated, you guessed it, to pictures of goths up trees.

Over at the Huffington Post, its list of The 23 Funniest Tumblr Blogs That Will Make You LOL includes:

• The by now iconic When Parents Text
• Know Your Meme, which sets out to document internet phenomena
• I Love Charts, run by someone who, presumably, loves charts
• Tastefully offensive, home to the comically captioned image
• Pleated Jeans, which seems to have no theme at all, it’s just a collection of funny stuff.

Another way to make sense of Tumblr is to browse its spotlight page, which highlights blogs based on input from the company’s team of editors.

For instance, here are the top Tumblrs to do with the US election.

Let us know your favourites in the comments below.