The new Explore page was born due to the rather eclectic nature of many a Tumblr -- unless you're a fashion blogger or something of the like, chances are your content is all over the map, which can make it hard to be seen in the Tumblr Directory.
Explore makes the Tumblr experience more democratic, allowing any tagged post to appear on the page and therefore get eyeballs, according to a blog post. There's also the Tumblr Wire at the top of the page -- reminiscent of "Top Tweets" or trending topics -- which displays top tags. You also can track tags to get notifications on your Dashboard.
While this move does add some level of curation to the blogging platform, we mourn the loss (or at least visibility) of the Directory. If there's an easy way to uncover it, we don't see it -- right now typing in www.tumblr.com/directory seems to be the only way to access it. Moreover, this move still does little to make blogs more visible to those outside the Tumblr community.
Lately, we've seen the platform kicking up curation efforts with fashion week coverage and curated topic pages, but we think more could be done to make Tumblr blogs more accessible.
For instance, Tumblr's homepage exists as wasted real estate -- a blank call to sign up that offers very little to those not familiar with the service. Now, if -- like Twitter -- that page featured some of these popular topics, tags and blogs we can see more blogs gaining attention and more people drawn to the service.