Look At This Fucking Hipster is one of the many Tumblr blogs with a one-track mind: it just wants to share pics (and mocking captions) of lame and sometimes hilarious-looking hipsters.

At the end of June, that single-mindedness earned its author, comedian Joe Mande, a book deal and a good deal of attention. And now, predictably, publishers and other idea-hungry content producers are scouring Tumblr for the next blog-to-book phenom. Except, as anyone who has looked around the blogging service knows, many of its blogs are pornographic. 

Tumblr is the middle ground between Twitter and full-scale blogging. There’s no limit on word count, but it’s generally used to post pictures with captions. It’s free, takes maybe 30 seconds to set up and is probably the easiest blogging platform to manage. 

Those attributes have made Tumblr popular. It can average upwards of 7 million views per month – a fraction of Twitter’s 30-something million, with a fraction of the hype. But being fast, free and easy are also the perfect conditions for peddling smut, it seems. 

Top content on Tumblr is a mix of goofy single-purpose blogs like Look At This Fucking Hipster or This Is Why You’re Fat, a showcase of over-the-top high-fat food, and straightforward sex like Indie Porn and Bend Me Over. 

Quantcast, a firm that measures traffic, estimates that 16 of the top 20 Tumblr blogs are “adult.”

This will no doubt raise concerns, since many jurisdictions require legal age verification before entering porn sites. Tumblr has no such filters and by and large is unregulated. Plus, many of the pictures are copyrighted and used without permission.

But it isn’t the lone blogging service to host amateur pornographers. 

Ning, another blogging start-up, has banned adult content from its pages, but only because it scares off advertisers, it says. Facebook and MySpace do a fairly decent job of flagging nudity.

Twitter will probably be next to come under scrutiny. Naked pictures – at least in the application Twitpics – and porn marketers linking to their sites are already out in full-force there.

But is blogging pornography that much more objectionable than other porn sites? Or does the cottage industry of blog porn help power sites like Tumblr so the rest of the world can read Look At This Fucking Hipster?

Somewhere, this is a giant-sized ethical dilemma. On the Internet, it’s just another day.

joshuae@nowtoronto.com