StumbleUpon is more powerful than I first thought.
In case you haven’t tried it, StumbleUpon is a fairly unique new tool to help browse the web. It’s a toolbar that you can easily download and install in your browser (IE or Firefox). With it, you can easily vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on any web page you go to, kind of like Tivo. As you vote for websites, StumbleUpon compares the sites you like to the sites that other people like. Then, when you click “Stumble!”, it automatically takes you to other websites, most likely ones you haven’t heard of, but that StumbleUpon thinks you’ll like.
My first impression of StumbleUpon as a user was positive – it very quickly started taking me to Mac-related sites, many of which I hadn’t heard of. It was neat, but since I rarely have time to just randomly browse the web, I didn’t use it much.
I didn’t give StumbleUpon much more thought, despite all of the eBay/StumbleUpon acquisition rumors, until today.
For the first time, this morning I decided to actually vote for my own blog, Psychohistory, with StumbleUpon. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Why not a little self-promotion?
Tonight, I checked my blog statistics, and the number one referring site to my blog today was… StumbleUpon. 29 hits out of 380 total. That might sound like a small number (it is), but I’m just shocked that a single vote could bring traffic to my blog.
Something real is going on here… reading the WordPress forums I see that a lot of blog authors are getting thousands of hits a day from StumbleUpon. If any of that is hitting my blog, then there must be a fairly significant flow sourcing from StumbleUpon users.
In any case, if you haven’t downloaded StumbleUpon yet, it’s worth checking out. And if you run a website, it’s worth thinking about how to best get people to vote for your site in StumbleUpon. This page on the StumbleUpon site helps you integrate their tags into your pages.
Click this link below to vote for this blog… 🙂
Stumble it!
Psychohistory 
That was an interesting and helpful post, but when I went to check out the tag intergration page, the instructions made little sense to me. What is this ‘”single.php”?
Hi Vanessa,
I believe that is a configuration file for WordPress when you are hosting your blog with the code from WordPress.org. WordPress.com doesn’t seem to have integrated support for StumbleUpon yet, but you can see I was able to hand-edit HTML to include a link below my picture (upper right).
Take care.
Adam
That’s what I was wondering….
I can see you have a generic WP theme (hey it’s the same as mine..)..
Gosh, I have a few things to work out now. I can see you have it there. I’m getting a bit weary of working out how to bypass the WP limitations, but I’ll give it a try… when I have the inclination to do so, I expect….
Thanks, Adam. 🙂
Hi Adam, I too had visited stumbleupon and didn’t think much of it… now, however, I’ll be sure to keep features like this in mind while coding yet another stealth web2.0 site.
Adam, I love StumbleUpon and even created a Squidoo page where I collect my Stumbles. I love Photography and enjoy Stumbling onto new images.
I’ve also suggested StumbleUpon to several eBay Store owners who are seeing an increase in traffic to their stores. For one seller it was the number 4 referring site after various eBay.com. eBay.CA and Google.
Just click on my name for my Squidoo page.
Hi
I’m a newbie to this, but I have find that its really cool tool.
I’m on a search for tips & tricks
Let me know if you got some more.
Thanks for links and explanation.
And for the post too.
Definitely learned something new today 😉
Amit