StumbleUpon

Essentially the Bruce Clay Australia blog was started on the 1st of April (I do love the irony of starting a blog on April fool's day). Since then I have not only been the main contributor of the blog but have also been tasked with content syndication goals for the blog to increase the profile and publicity of the blog. I have experimented with RSS content syndication engines as well as the usual social bookmarking sites ( Digg, Sphinn, reddit etc) but by far the best referral in terms of sheer numbers, low bounce rate and average time on site is StumbleUpon.

Photo by topgold via Creative Commons

Stumble Upon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Users list their preferences and likes and are randomly directed to a site/ blog post that is tagged with and matches those interests, think of it like the Pandora music player but for content. It was originally sold to eBay for $75,000,000 (that's 75 million if I got my zeroes right) and recently it was sold back to the original developers. StumbleUpon has more than 8,453,000 members as of October 11, 2009. It even has a nifty StumbleUpon Toolbar which makes it easy to rate selected articles and submit new articles for review by the StumbleUpon readers. One of the great things about StumbleUpon is that their algorithm is pretty good at choosing fun and interesting articles that match your tastes and deliver them seamlessly to you.

I think it is. People are getting picky about what they comment on lately. Or so I've seen in my travels around the blogophere. If you don't relate to whatever other people are writing about, you get no comments or recognition whatsoever. Take for example, my last couple posts...

I wrote about my newest adventure in World of Warcraft and I got NO responses. I had to ask for a comment. Well, I didn't have to but someone asked me to comment on their post so I asked them to comment on mine. But it's pretty sad, isn't it. But then a few days later (days people!!), I write about wanting to get a Wii Fit an start working out. I got 5 comments in less then a minute. I find that pretty pathetic. In all actuality, people were skipping over my WoW post and commenting on the posts below it.

Personally, I use StumbleUpon

Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

What is that, really? Well, I am not going to rewrite something that is already perfect, so if you don't know what it is check out the ReTweet Guide over at Mashable.com. Ben Parr gives a great intro to re-tweeting and which programs you can use to get started with Twitter.

Ben says;

"Retweeting is an integral part of the Twitter experience. The retweet (or “RT”) allows Twitter users to share the best links, tweets, and gems they find from others using the service. But for beginners, it’s not immediately obvious what retweets are, or what tools to use to make retweeting easier."

Install the Tweetmeme WordPress Plugin and get a cool little retweet button like I have in the top right of this post.

The retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to retweet their content on twitter.

I have spent many hours on sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and StumbleUpon, but now I feel that I don't need them any more. With Twitter (using Seesmic Desktop) I get all the same information I would want from those sites, and more!

If you do not have this plugin, or another way to retweet your content you are falling behind fast, IMO.