David Karp's blogging platform Tumblr, popular with creative types and those who dress like them in Sanfrooklyn, allows its users to modify their themes. And, just like the kids on MySpace, the users show them off to each other. Custom Tumblr themes have real social currency. Much like collecting pogs in sixth grade. And, as with pogs, you can be the rich kid and just buy yourself social superiority — Digg founder Kevin Rose and Connected Ventures cofounder Ricky Van Veen bought themes from Tumblize.com for $499. But for those of you on a college student or barista budget, click through for our step-by-step guide on how upgrading your Tumblr theme with no CSS, HTML or any other nerdy acronyms required.

If scenesters from Brooklyn to San Francisco's Mission District want to have Tumblr cool-kid bragging rights, they'll have to pay, founder David Karp has decided. Why has Karp finally set his unflinching blue eyes on Tumblr's bottom line? His hosting bills must be starting to pinch. He'll begin peddling paid Tumblr Pro accounts later this year. Flickr, which just added video for its pro members only, charges $25 a year for extra storage, but Karp tell us he hasn't figure out how much to charge his users just yet. What will Tumblr "Pros" get for their money? Karp says he's got "more than 10 features in the queue" including a tool that allows readers to submit content, more customizable themes and special page layouts. Check out screenshots of the new features below, and then wonder with us: Are they enough for ego-tumbling millennials to agree to pay Karp's fee?

While editing administrator code today, Tumblr founder David Karp and developer Marco Arment inadvertently published private user data for 40 minutes. Karp reports on his blog that 27 email addresses were exposed. He told us that four accounts — including popular Tumblr blogs by Julia Allison and Pete Nidzgorski — had their passwords changed. Karp told Valleywag he knows who changed the passwords. "He was a registered user, so we were actually able to look up his info," Karp said. The suspected hacker won't lose his Tumblr account. "I don't think we'll be taking this out on him," Karp said.

It's unclear if wanterpreneurs Julia Allison, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin will cancel their Silicon Valley tour entirely, but word is the trio has wised up to venture-capital realities. Valley angel Ron Conway, an early backer of Google and Ask.com, "has a list of 200 things he'd invest in and nowhere on there is content," Allison's friend David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, advised her. She got the same advice from Valleywag commenters. Undaunted, Allison, Asha and Rambin are already onto funding plan B. The New York Post reports the trio will star in a pilot for a reality TV show named IT Girls about creating their Web company. The difference between exposing every detail of their lives to Web viewers and TV audiences? The latter actually gets them paid.

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What was Star editrix-at-large Julia Allison saying to Tumblr's David Karp while they waited for Jason Calacanis's limo in Manhattan? (Photo by innonate)

Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman is a shameless self-promoter. And it disgusts us. The photo below of Forman and Tumblr founder David Karp, however, does not.

Tumblr founder David Karp plans to make money off his microblogging platform — the one used by Julia Allison as well as dirtier, more creative types mostly found in San Francisco's Mission District and Brooklyn's Williamsburg — by creating a front page kind of like Digg's. Except on Tumblr Radar, a video, post or image's popularity will be determined by how many times its "reblogged." The idea is to help users discover other Tumblr blogs while serving them brand ads. Karp was overheard talking to former DoubleClick founder Kevin Ryan about the prospect last week. Karp has told us this front page will end up looking like a cross between Apple's iTunes store and Ffffound.com. Thanks to a rule-breaking beta tester, we won't have to wait to find out if that's true. Here's a leaked screenshot of Tumblr Radar:

Amazon's S3 Web-storage service, favored by startups too poor to afford their own hard drives or too technically inept to set them up, went down for about two hours earlier today, slowing down graphics on services like Twitter and Tumblr, SAI reports. "Not a big deal," Tumblr founder David Karp told us. "A reminder for a lot of services that redundancy beyond Amazon is still necessary," he said. Maybe not for you, David. But I'm lost without my morning dose of Nevver.

Rackspace management called Tumblr's David Karp yesterday and pleaded for mercy. The Web-hosting service even offered to cut bandwidth chargeds from $2 a gigabyte down to 40 cents. (Other Rackspace customers, take note.) Didn't work. Karp, who runs today's favorite blogging tool for emo hipsters, dropped the hammer anyway. In the end, he tells us, it wasn't even Rackspace's winter and fall full of fail that led him to quit the service.

Tumblr differs from most blog software: It doesn't just let you post entries; it also provides an interface for reading the blogs of other Tumblr users. In that regard, it's duplicating a feature available on LiveJournal for a decade — and yet its users still manage to find it befuddling. "Right now I'm following 35 people," Connected Ventures cofounder Rickvy Van Veen writes on his personal blog.

Early adopter and technology evangelist Julia Allison took time from a busy punditry schedule for a rare update to her personal blog "And another thing..." yesterday. And then she posted another 33 times. One post's topic? Allison's frustration with Tumblr and its CEO, David Karp. The Fox Business News contributor wants Tumblr to become a "REAL company." Her words:

Microblogging service Tumblr went down for a few hours yesterday. The outage cost the world several hours of vintage pinup girls and ironic reblogging. And it cost managed hosting service Rackspace a customer.

"My bf is like, so famous," David Karp's girlfriend Amy notes on her blog. And it's increasingly true. Yesterday found Karp featured in the New York Post's gossip rag, Page Six magazine. Just a few days before that, the New York Observer asked, "Would You Take a Tumblr With This Man?" You'll never guess who's taking credit for all the attention. Here's a hint: She's Julia Allison. Oops, ruined that game.

Tumblr creator David Karp is being heralded as the "Internet's Boy Wonder" in Page Six magazine today. It's not like that bothers us or anything, but a boy wonder? The guy who invented the television was called a Boy Wonder. Karl Rove was called a Boy Wonder because he knew how to ruin the entire world. Karp streamlined a particular way to post things on the internet. We don't credit the inventor of the electric toothbrush as having pioneered the whole concept of teeth-brushing. All we're saying: if he didn't have that steely gaze and lived in Ohio, would Page Six give a shit? It's a question for the ages. After the jump, a disappointing list of other Boy Wonders time forgot.

The New York Observer uncovers the truth about Tumblr founder David Karp. OMG! He's only 21! Great. He also dropped out of high school and never went to college. Instead, he kept the reasonably popular UrbanBaby site, later sold to CNET, running and eventually founded the very useful Tumblr. Which now has 170,000 members. That's tiny when compared to the giants of Silicon Valley, but that didn't seem to stop Karp from sniping the competition.

David Karp, the creator of Tumblr, may be working on a new project with the attention-seeking Jakob Lodwick, but he doesn't want anything to do with Lodwick's attention-seeking means. Karp called Silicon Alley Insider while on vacation in Puerto Rico to deny any involvement with the Norbum project:

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with David Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller's backing or Allison's cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he's grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag's top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it's meta.

Jakob Lodwick, no longer Barry Diller's secret weapon, is out at Vimeo, the IAC-controlled online-video site he founded. So what's next for the notorious fame-seeker?