FHK SitRep 08.13.08: Anyone Want to Stumble?

Get this Button for Your Blog

Updated from 07/23/07

You may notice that FHK has added a Stumbleupon button to our blog posts. During the month of July so far, over 20 % of our blog traffic has come from Stumbleupon.

Stumbleupon is a new concept in social networking. According to its “About” page:

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine….

Using a combination of human opinions and machine learning to immediately deliver relevant content, StumbleUpon presents only web sites which have been suggested by other like-minded Stumblers. Each time the ‘Stumble’ button is clicked, the user is presented with a high quality web site based on the collective opinions of other like-minded web surfers.

When you sign up for Stumbleupon, you’ll get a new toolbar, and from that toolbar you can submit stories you like, and vote on stories by giving them a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. You can also “stumble,” which means that you will be sent stories that the system thinks you will like, based on your preferences, the friends you have made, and the stories you have given a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to. As you continue to stumble, the sytem learns your likes and dislikes and sends you better and better stories.

From the perspective of a blogger, this is encouraging, because you know that many of the visitors to your site from Stumbleupon are actually looking for stories like the ones that you are posting.

Stumbleupon has a spam-policy which prohibits one user from submitting very many stories from the same site. This makes it difficult to promote your own blog through the Stumbleupon, so the majority of submissions need to come from blog readers.

With over 2,000,000 registered users, Stumbleupon is quickly becoming very influential on the web in terms of what information is available. You can have an impact on the outcome by supporting articles and blogs you enjoy reading through Stumbleupon. For more information about Stumleupon, see its help page.

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