Stumble Upon
www.stumbleupon.com Stumble Upon is just a little different from the other social bookmarking websites (actually they are all just a little bit different from each other). It works as a browser plugin to let you ‘stumble upon’ and rate websites, articles, blogs, photos, videos etc. A person using Stumble Upon is known as a ‘stumble’, and when you come across an interesting web find you just click the Stumble! Button
on your tool bar and add it to your Stumble Upon favourites. All the functions that you would normally use in social bookmarking are made available on your browser with Stumble Upon.
Stumble Upon is a great way to discover exciting new content on the web in a relatively random fashion, as well as sharing your finds with your friends.
When you click the button on your browser, Stumble Upon generates web page matches according to your preferences. The pages displayed are those that have been recommended by your friends or other users of Stumble that have interests similar to you.
Using Stumble Upon: Making It Work for You
To use Stumble Upon all you need to do is to sign up for a free account and then download the free browser plug in. Once this is installed and activated, then Stumble Upon chooses which new website will be displayed depending on the ratings you assigned to previous pages, or on ratings of websites by your friends and the sometimes perhaps even based upon the ratings of other users on Stumble Upon who have the same interests as you. So, if people in your network give your website thumbs up, more and more people are likely to visit it.
The content on Stumble Upon is based on a rating system that allows users to give thumbs up or thumbs down to a website, so it is an entirely recommendation based system that makes extensive use of social networking principles. It also has a one click blogging system, and users can rate a blog with a thumbs up or thumbs down decision.
What Stumble Upon actually uses is called collaborative filtering. This is an automated process that makes active use of the opinions of the people using the system. It also takes into account the personal preferences that come about from machine learning. This creates a virtual community of people who are connected to each other, and over time this community should become ever more closely linked because of the new linkages being added every day.
The website updates each user’s personal profile, which is a blog style record of the sites that that particular user has rated.
Then, Stumble Upon generates peer group networks of users that are connected by similar interests, and it is these social networks that organize the distribution of the content on Stumble Upon.
What happens is that users of Stumble Upon only the get to view the pages that have been recommended by their friends or those who have similar interests.
Instead of just giving a site a thumbs up or down, you also have the option of leaving comments on the website, and this will also appear in the user’s profile/blog. This way of discovering content on the web is becoming surprisingly close to automating the word of mouth marketing function.
Stumblers have the chance to rate and review the blogs created by their peers, and, as a Stumbler, you could also join certain interest groups as well to further increase the interactivity of your account. These are community forums created to discuss specific topics wherein users post comments in such a way that it becomes more like a discussion board.
Stumble Upon claims to have a certain edge over conventional search methods, and some of these could be crucial to increasing your website’s visibility and directing traffic towards it.
Using search engines often means that we have to carefully sift through pages and pages of seemingly relevant content, but often these results are nothing more than somewhat irrelevant keyword matches which may be far from what you are looking for.
Using Stumble Upon, however, you can be sure that if the content on your website is good, then people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say will see you.
Members have also come to trust content on Stumble Upon, since members are taken directly to matches that are sorted according to interests and preferences. They are more likely to visit your site if it is visible on Stumble Upon.
Like most other social bookmarking sites, Stumble Upon uses technology that is essentially driven by humans. By using a combination of machine learning and human opinions to yield search results, Stumble Upon delivers content that is highly relevant and appropriate, so that the user gets a high quality website every time they search for something and they come to trust this pattern. This means that when your website shows up on Stumble Upon, it will almost automatically have greater credibility.
Stumble Upon is quite easy to use too, so it could work for you, even if you are just learning the ropes of social bookmarking. Also, if your target audience is not exceptionally good at understanding the workings of the internet and social bookmarking, Stumble Upon is a good place to start. Users can add your website to their favourites with a simple click and they also have the opportunity to pass your link on to others in their online community. They can also give feedback or make comments.
This creates an inevitable network of visitors to your website. Stumble Upon lists nearly five hundred topics that users can choose to list as their interests and preferences. This allows you to get your website known in different circles and communities of users.
The internet just keeps getting bigger and more complex each day. Information is also constantly changing. Stumble Upon has a dynamic approach keeping fully abreast of all of the freshest sites, blogs and articles on the internet. It filters tons of information on the website to bring content to its visitors. So if you have created a new website, you can promote it and invite feedback and comments on it by using Stumble Upon.
Furthermore, the more active you are on Stumble Upon, the more visibility you will gain, because Stumble Upon compiles a list of its most active users, and this gives extra exposure to those who are very active and helpful. It also shows you people on Stumble Upon who are geographically close to you.
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