Yahoo! (YHOO) announced this morning that it is buying social blogging company Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash.

Tumblr is a six-year old company based in New York. It is run by a charismatic 26 year-old entrepreneur named David Karp, who will pocket hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal and has therefore become an object of fascination for the New York tabloids.

Related: High School Dropout to Tech Titan

Tumblr allows users to create simple blogs and share words, pictures, and video. It is one of a handful of massive social publishing platforms created in the past decade, a group that also includes companies like Facebook (FB), Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Tumblr's audience is massive. The company's blogs receive 300 million unique visitors per month, and a staggering 120,000 new blogs are created every day (not blog posts--blogs). This mind-blowing traffic has made Tumblr one of the largest digital media companies in the world.

The Tumblr deal will vastly increase

Is air coming out of the precious metal commodities bubble? Silver’s sharp slide early Monday could be proof that the bull market in gold and silver has reached its limit. Silver fell nearly 9% in the first 10 minutes of Asian trading to $20.30 an ounce — its lowest level since September 2010. Silver’s stumble also brought down the price of gold; the yellow metal hit a one-month low of $1,338.10 an ounce and extended its slump for an eighth straight day. Gold has fallen more than 7% in May.

Related: Jim Rogers on Gold: Continues to Have a Long Overdue Correction

Silver’s selloff has a lot to do with the rise in the yen, says The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task. The yen strengthened against the U.S. Dollar after a report by the Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said Japan's economy is gradually recovering after an upturn in exports and factory output. Hedge funds and other institutional investors are reducing their positions in silver and buying the yen to cover their losses, notes Task.