My Shares

The My Shares feature is hidden in your inbox

Clicking through reveals a history of messages you have previously received through the “Send To” interface on the toolbar. If you haven’t yet viewed items that have been sent to you, they won’t be shown on this page.

I must admit it was a little bit of a challenge grabbing a screenshot which didn’t contain any self-promotional messages as a lot of my online friends use the Send To feature to make me aware of articles they have written and I might have missed.

So what I did was ask my Twitter friends to send me a few links – this was also complicated, because to send links through StumbleUpon, there needs to be a mutual friendship, and I have been maxed out with 200 friends for over 6 months, and that did not include many of the friends who responded to my plea for help – so I had to go culling long-term friends just to grab a screenshot.

I would like to thank my Twitter friends of their help
Liamvictor (Liamvictor) who blogs at Liam Delahunty, Smirking Loon & Bigger Brighter Better
Engtech (Ninetimessix) who blogs at Internet Duct Tape
Terence (Terencechang) who blogs at The Internet Entrepreneur Diary
Nathania (Nathania) who blogs at Social Media Butterfly
Leigh (Crazymeezer) who blogs at All For Women and Crazy Meezer

A few others offered to help or try to help but had technical or other problems.

What Is Wrong With Stumbleupon My Shares?

Just like the messaging, it only shows one side of the conversation

Sometimes the Send To feature can result in some real backwards and forwards conversation, 4 or 5 messages. I certainly need to have a visible record of the messages I have sent people somewhere, not just what they have sent me.

I think it could also benefit from other features such as specific search

I am glad Stumbleupon continues to add a few more features

1. Dead Stumbles

Tim earlier today wrote about how content can end up in “The Stumbleupon Graveyard” through various bugs. It is actually quite a major problem that can prevent exceptional content from gaining the exposure to the Stumbleupon community it might deserve.

It is something that can happen totally by accident even to people who know about it, and it has certainly happened to me even on some of my best articles.

As an example, my WP SEO Masterclass

It was actually first discovered by Daniel from Daily Blog Tips June 19,2007 and received quite a number of thumbs up, but very little traffic.

I actually spotted this back in June and whilst I didn’t give it a full review as it was my own content, I did at least give it some tags. It is not something I make a habit of, but some tags is better than none at all.
If you look carefully at that screenshot, you will see that I reviewed it 7 months previously, and Daniel discovered it just a few seconds before the screenshot was taken.

I happened to be chatting with Daniel on IM at the time and asked if he would mind returning to the old post and adding a review to it, so I could see what effect that would have on “repairing” the damage caused by not having a review, and maybe pulling the post out of what Tim calls the StumbleUpon Graveyard.

The results were dramatic

It is just a few hundred extra visitors to one post over a few days, but as it is about SEO – not a very popular general topic on Stumbleupon, it is a good result, especially as this was more like an aftershock which might not have benefited from all the previous voting activity.

2. Recent Visitors

In my profile I can see that there have been 65 visitors to my profile since I last looked at the What’s new page. If I click through to the page, I am only allowed to see the last 10, even though I am a pro member.

3. What’s New

Whilst we are there, lets take a look at what’s new, which displays posts that my friends have recently reviewed.

It only shows the last 10, and when you are following a full 199 people (you can’t have more), and a large number of them are highly active, you end up with the page being updated every few minutes, and rarely does it cover more than the last hour.
The big problem for me is that my friends are interested in all kinds of topics, in addition to the ones I am interested in. Why can’t I somehow scroll back through the last 100 or 200 reviews (there are more than that per day), and maybe even just filter it to the topics of most interest?

4. Messaging

No screen shot, as the messages are private, but when I look at my inbox, I really wish I could also see my replies on the same page.

As more than half of the messages are people requesting for me to follow them, I really wish StumbleUpon would make it clearer to members that someone following 199 people can’t add any more.
I wish I could, I have over 700 people following me on Stumbleupon, many who discover great content I would be interesting in, but I currently have to discover that content through other people.

5. Code Page / Character Set With Punctuation

Stumbleupon has a great feature – when you highlight some text and then hit the thumb up, the text you highlighted is used in the review, in addition to the title when you are the one submitting.

For some reason they don’t pick up the correct character mapping, so punctuation gets totally messed up even from blogs which mainly use UTF8.

This really is something a developer could probably fix in a few hours.

6. Line Spacing

This is the same review or in this case article excerpt as in the previous screen shot, only this time as it appears on my Stumbleupon blog, and not how it appears on the review page.

You will notice there is a difference in the line spacing.

For some reason Stumbleupon has no problems with HTML paragraph tags on Stumbleupon blogs, and their new WYSIWYG HTML editor actually uses paragraphs for line formatting as well.

Unfortunately individual reviews for a page, or various “What’s hot” or “What’s new” pages strip out the paragraph tags making reviews often look like a mess.

It is possible to manually use line-break BR tags, but that is inconvenient, defeats the purpose of the WYSIWYG editor, and requires a knowledge of HTML.

7. Search

I know tag based search is “trendy” but currently that is all that is available from Stumbleupon – it kind of defeats the purpose of writing detailed reviews about a website which contain additional keywords that might help people find useful content.
It is possible to use a Google site search on a specific sub-domain, but then that can produce very noisy results due to additional keywords being used within profile pages.
If I search my own Stumbleupon blog for “SEO” using a Google site search, it will bring up almost every page, because I include SEO in my description. That doesn’t help me find reviews I have written about “SEO”.

Some kind of full text search is required, based upon only the content contained in reviews.

Have I missed any problems that really annoy you?

3 years ago Google introduced rel=”nofollow”, very similar to rel=”me” , rel=”friend” and other XFN and FOAF standards.
Today Google are championing their new API with the slogan “URLs Are People Too”

3 years ago that was true, now URLs on many (most) places where people congregate on the web are no longer “people” because in a supposed attempt to combat comment spam, Google encouraged major sites to use rel=”nofollow” making the links null and void.

I did some initial testing with the example tools Google provides, and the results were less than encouraging, because lots of the data they probably need has nofollow links. There is data out there that is usable, but maybe I need to give Google more help.

Fairly poor results considering how interconnected I am.

People who have better results have them primarily for 2 reasons

1. They gave Google a lot more data to work with on the form – I only gave this blog URL
2. They have extensive blogroll links to their social media profiles, and use a blogging platform that uses XFN extensively (as Jordan demonstrated on Marketing Pilgrim)

The Google system currently doesn’t seem to make good use of dispersed information, even when it can be used because there isn’t nofollow, and it includes rel=”me”

As an example take a look at my MyBlogLog profile

If you look at the source code on my MyBlogLog profile, you will notice that it uses rel=”me” on all the profile links, so lets see what happens if we use my MyblogLog profile as the source.

Lots more results – but they certainly didn’t pick up all my associations from my Technorati profile as I would expect to see a few more of my public blogs, and Twitter.

Lets see what happens if I just use my Stumbleupon profile, which is connected from both my Technorati profile and my MyBlogLog profile.

Here is a direct link to the search with the API

Just one Degree of Separation

Google currently is taking data you give it, and finding profiles it can associate with that data, but they don’t then extrapolate out to further connections. With the Stumbleupon test they did find my MyBlogLog profile, but then didn’t use the extensive data on that page to find more results.
To use the API extensively, it will be necessary to perform multiple recursive calls to find useful data, and some connections won’t be found because some of the hops won’t have rel=”me” associations.

It is interesting to note that they are picking up Technorati claim code in some of the searches, rather than actual profiles that link to the pages in reverse in many instances.
Nofollow is probably why they could pick up my MyBlogLog profile from Stumbleupon data, but couldn’t find it declared in Technorati.

Ultimate Proof That Nofollow Kills This Dead?

The most marked up pages regarding XFN and Microformats that I know of are Technorati, who have been champions of microformats for as long as I can remember.

Almost every single link on my Technorati page has some form of microformat data, but the page also has meta index nofollow in the header.

Now take a look at a very empty page when you use your technorati profile as your source data.

Google Scraper API

Ultimately this isn’t far removed from simple scraping scripts easily created by your average Blackhat SEO, or an averge PHP programmer familiar with using CURL and regular expressions.

Such a programmer could easily create something similar in a couple of days, though it would probably be much easier using Yahoo search results rather than Google’s – Yahoo have an Open API and report links whether they have follow or not.

In fact it is quite likely that such a 3rd party tool would give you much better results than Google currently provide.

Currently I don’t intend to help Google by providing them with more direct links to my social profiles with specific XFN – it can help with reputation management, but at the same time that would push all the great things readers have said about me further down the SERP. That isn’t necessarily an advantage.

I would also be interested if data starts showing up which could only be derived from links that are nofollowed which has numerous SEO implications if the data ever makes it into Google’s main search algorithms.

I would be more excited if Google announced support for additional XFN alternatives (maybe extended from XPN proposals), as an alternative to using nofollow, although the majority of people wouldn’t use them – I am sure paid review services would encourage support.

Currently Google shouldn’t be winning any prizes for this one, why is everyone talking about it?

Update

In this article I linked through to my Technorati profile. Technorati extensively uses meta nofollow, thus Technorati profile pages are not being naturally indexed – you have to link through to them for Google to index them, and whilst I have linked through to various aspects of my technorati profiles in the past, such as the opml of my favorites, I hadn’t linked through to my specific profile.
Since this article was published, Google has indexed it, followed the links, and indexed my Technorati profile as well – the cache data for my profile page is 2nd February.
If you now check my connections using Technorati as a source, you get a massive amount of data from multiple services.

Ebay have now launched their own Social News site to highlight the weird and wonderful best items for sale on Ebay, past and present.

What is strange is that it doesn’t appear on their community “sneak peek” though it is still in beta.

There also doesn’t appear to be any mention of it on the Ebay blog.

How much traffic a site like this could drive really depends on how much Ebay decide to promote it, but it if you are a regular on Ebay, it might be a good idea to invest a little time in building up both your profile and those of your products.

Valleywag was a little critical, saying they are copying Digg and Craigslist but considering Ebay already own Stumbleupon, this was a logical direction to take.
I wonder if they might integrate the 2 in some way, allowing you to Stumble the Best of Ebay.

1. To say thanks, great post
2. To test stumbleupon algorithm
3. To be the first to discover a new site
4. To build up the strength of a page linking to them
5. To gain traffic both short and long term from the 3rd party
6. To benefit from multiple tier referral programs
7. To bookmark a future resource
8. To build up content
9. To strengthen good relationships with a power user
10. To repair bad relationships
11. Because you stroked their ego
12. For reputation management and branding
13. To share it because it is good content
14. To build awareness in an issue
15. To get them to come and visit their site (linked from profile)
16. Because they are a client
17. To build up followers
18. To get a stumble or Digg on -!- an important story -!-
19. Because someone asked
20. Because they are just being nice
21. To make a comment because they force you to register (just hope it is good)
22. To Get Their Attention
23. because they are polite
24. Because they are just being funny
25. They have auto stumble switched on, and it is just as fast as clicking Stumble

Please note:- this is just a list, and I am not advocating anyone does all, or even any of the above.

All links point to an assortment of quality articles from my recent browsing and stumbling for your enjoyment.

From every single one of those communities I have possibly gained more traffic than I have given them in return, though it is very difficult to judge exactly when you start gaining traffic, and maybe that isn’t really the point. You can’t easily track RSS clicks to a site unless you destroy the SEO advantages of syndication by having nice clean links and ultimately you hope for people to discover you once, and then subscribe.
As you send people to a particular site, just like when you send people to a useful blog post, you don’t lose them as readers, and more often than not you get traffic back in return.

I posted these traffic numbers over on Tinu’s blog in a comment, but thought I would share them here as well.

• MyBlogLog – I have received 2600 visits directly from MyBlogLog since November, and that increased a fair amount once I hit the top50 communities which only happened fairly recently. I would also gain a small surge each time I was included as a hot member. I have never used their broadcast facility, and only rarely send messages to other users.
• Bumpzee – I am very active on Bumpzee running one of the largest communities (No Nofollow), and it really is only since I started investing time in building that community that I saw a major benefit other than for networking and discovery. Bumpzee has delivered … 3700 visitors in total.
  Remember that is over less time – I joined Bumpzee in January, and it was not until April that I started my community there.
• Blogcatalog is another community that I have been actively involved with for a number of months, and I even do a little consulting with them. The biggest driving force of traffic for Blogcatalog is without doubt being highly active on their forums, and I don’t have that much time for forums, but I have received a healthy 985 visitors in total, though many of those visits are from people who use Blogcatalog for bookmarking their favorite blogs. This is traffic since April, so half the time compared to MyBlogLog.

It is strange how communities develop from different directions

Blogcatalog Solving Problems – Adding Features

One of the biggest requests Blogcatalog received was that people were looking for more categories on the main discussion forums, or for a place where they could have a more focused discussion regarding a specific niche topic. Blogcatalog are now beta testing group discussions.

Currently you can only start a group if you are a contributor, but soon that restriction will be lifted. Any member of Blogcatalog can however participate in groups.

Bumpzee No Nofollow Community & Lack Of Bumps

A recent discussion on Bumpzee highlighted a problem, but I am not yet sure of the answer.
The NoNofollow community is fairly cohesive but people are not necessarily bumping stories even if they appreciate them.
It only sometimes takes 2 or 3 bumps to appear on the widgets, so just you and the author is enough, yet people don’t bump, but they might stumble or sphinn instead.

Note: in the following example I selected to randomly choose niches just to aid understanding, not to single anyone out because

The problem is that whilst the community is strong as a horizontal market with many shared beliefs and goals in building a community, only a fraction of the members are going to be interested in a vertical niche such as parenting or fiction writing.

The community on Bumpzee really needs to grow larger to gain sufficient members in a niche, followed or nofollowed blogs, for the niche sites to stand out.

Bumpzee grew from the original Affiliate Marketing community and there is plenty of overlap with the Dofollow cummunity. This frequently results in affiliate marketing articles appearing on parenting blogs which have joined bumpzee for the dofollow community.

The solution is to grow the number of parenting blogs in the dofollow community, or to grow the number of members in a dedicated community for parenting blogs.

Who is responsible to grow the number of parenting blogs to improve relevance?

In my mind it is a shared responsibility, Bumpzee need to maintain a stable and inviting platform, and parenting blogs need to promote Bumpzee to their topical neighbours.

MyBlogLog Decline In Usage?

It seems like eons ago, but around December/January when this blog had less than 100 subscribers, a full 7% of my traffic was coming from MyBlogLog, and the community was very active. I established many new relationships during that time with other bloggers who remain some of my hardcore readers, and who I can frequently count on for the occasional link, Stumble, Digg or Sphinn.
Some bloggers still use MyBlogLog for browsing occasionally, in fact many do and I even take the occasional stroll, and it may be that you grow beyond the biggest benefit or have problems with the way they make changes.
Once you have found your place within the blogging community and have an established readership, and a bulging feed reader, you end up going increasingly directly to the source.
You still see the same familiar faces on the widgets, but you know who they are, and quite often they are visiting because you have just visited them, and left a comment, but they might not visit you through the MyBlogLog interface.

This blog isn’t extremely high traffic – whilst feed subscriptions grow, that doesn’t necessarily increase page views a huge amount. I don’t have any front page Diggs to totally destroy any stats I might have. I can still remember the people who sent 10 or 20 visitors to me, and gave me a few new subscribers.

With total page views (counted in Google Analytics not the totally unreliable AWStats that reports 6x as many) of 192,000 over the last 10 months, and discounting a lot of clicks I have made from Mybloglog to some of my articles from the stats (I can’t use IP blocking), MyBlogLog accounts for slightly more than 1% of my direct traffic.

However I have only had 897 MyBlogLog clicks leaving the site, some of which are mine as well, so it might be that only 1/3 of the traffic is what I would regard as “browsing” traffic, people actively using the MyBlogLog widget for discovery, which takes new traffic down to 0.3%

The more you get involved with the communities the more you get in return, but that takes time, just like many forum communities.

If you are the only knitting blog using Blogrush, you will get poor traffic, but you will probably get some. There needs to be enough blogs in a category to achieve adequate distribution.

There might be a slight decline among people who have moved on to other blog networking communities for one reason or another, but overall MyBlogLog is still growing. What has declined is my own activity, and the amount that active involvement affects my total traffic.

Parallels With Blogrush?

I have sent far more traffic to Blogrush currently than they have sent to me? I am not worried about that in the slightest, it is very early days.

If you are the only one with a parenting blog using Blogrush, you are going to get very little targeted traffic.

You have a few choices:-

• Rip it off your blog and declare it as a load of junk
• Not put it on your blog and just sit back and do nothing
• Place it on your blog and suffer in silence
• Place it on your blog, give constructive feedback, and try to build your topical community.

One of the good things with Blogrush is that there is a relatively low time commitment in using it. You can just place it on your blog and do nothing, you might get a few visitors.

Can you imagine Stumbleupon if no one hit the “Stumble” button?

Can you imagine the “qualified traffic” you would receive if you were the only web design site currently listed?

Whilst you might not think of Blogrush as “community building” because there are no faces, and you click directly through to the article on the site, if there isn’t currently a topical community for your niche blog, you are not going to receive as much targeted traffic.

Are You The Hub Or The Spoke?

Discovery is a pretty powerful thing when you use it to leverage other networks. Being the first to discover a blog that happens to be created by one of your readers, and then stumbling it can bring about some strange reactions.

The story is up on Sphinn and on Andrews local search blog. I didn’t realise it at the time but Andrew is actually one of those less vocal regular readers of my blog, and even signed up to Blogrush under me.

• Do you think I am likely to stumble his content a little more?
• Do you think Andrew will remember to stumble my posts occasionally?
• Will we find an occasional way to link to each other when topics cross over?

Now I am sure I might have come across Andrew’s blog sometime in the future, if someone else had come across it, or maybe he had submitted an article to Sphinn or gone on a linking spree, but Blogrush in this particular case provided a bridge that might otherwise not have existed.

The Value of Blogging Communities

This is just a clinical look for those sterile types that are just crunching numbers rather than looking at relationships.

• Conversational Bloggers are linkerati
• Conversational Bloggers are often sophisticated users likely (but not always, bribery helps lots) to subscribe without paying them with free gifts
• Bloggers typically leave useful content in comments, and might return to carry on the conversation

To the sterile number crunchers I would point out that whilst those seemingly horrible figures such as 1% of traffic from MyBlogLog might seem meaningless, I would estimate that I have gained 70% of my subscribers from my involvement in these communities, either directly or through the relationships I have built.

Might I have gained that traffic regardless? It is possible, if you are really a believer in destiny. I am more a believer in hard work.

I do know I could set up a squeeze page and pay for traffic, and have 2000 email subscribers for less than $1000, but they wouldn’t be the same.

It is much easier to launch a new blog or a whole business if you already have the attention of a reasonably sized audience.

Update

Adding a Grazr widget to aid in the discussion. With Grazr you can import and OPML file to display feeds. There are lots of other widgets that do something similar.

Whilst I really appreciate facts, where there are a lack of facts I appreciate discussions that at least try to create models based upon extensive research data

You might find this a little geeky, but for those that like delving into how things might work, Tim’s modelling of the Stumbleupon algorithm is just pure gold.

For those unfamiliar with Antisocial, these are the differences

• All links have nofollow added – this might sound strange coming from someone who strongly supports the removal of nofollow from comments, but there is no logical purpose having a followable link to a social bookmark site that just points to a submission form
• TwitThis Support – for those that like Tweeting
• StumbleUpon Fix – The original has a bug in the StumbleUpon link
• New support for Sphinn – lots of people are going to use it, so I am sure it is a welcome addition

I am aware that Eyefall previously posted a modified version of the original to include Sphinn, but it doesn’t include the other necessary changes, and who really wants to use a plugin that sucks for SEO, especially the primary users of Sphinn, most likely SEOs.

Another valuable note, very few people will actually take action and use patched files, or even files presented as phps which you have to copy and paste.
If you don’t distribute plugins in an idiot proof zip file, very few people will use it.

I learnt this from experience by offering initially instructions on how to patch Sociable, and how many of my readers didn’t take action.

If you are still unsure about why you might want to use my version of Sociable, you might appreciate this “blast from the past” about how many blogs can retain as much as 50% more link juice internally.

For more information on the plugin itself, please visit the main download page.

For those that know all about it, here is a quick download link for Antisocial

Note: As always, no version number change though I have updated the notes within it – I still look on this as not being a branch of the original, just a hack for SEO minded individuals.
It still contains the sociable bug with WordPress 2.2.1 as I recently mentioned

One of the biggest takeaways from Traffic Stampede Secrets that I reviewed a few months ago was how important it was to target the right social bookmarking and networking sites for your own sites, and also to evaluate and test how effective a particular bookmarking button might be.

I have just removed my StumbleUpon graphic that floats on the top right of every post, and the Technorati favorites button that was included in the same place.

StumbleUpon

I love StumbleUpon, I use it daily to find great sites, and my readers love it as well.

So why did I remove it?

I use a lot of tracking, and frequently I saw clicks of the StumbleUpon button, but no corresponding reviews.
Someone will click the button, and decide not to write a review, and then click their stumble button to go somewhere else. People are shy….

In that situation you don’t get a vote even if one was intended!

If someone is using StumbleUpon, they have the toolbar installed. The “Thumbs Up” button is right next to the Stumble Button.

It is possible I will get a few less reviews, but hopefully I will also get a few more positive votes for my content – those people who clicked a graphic and were too shy to write a review.

Thus whilst StumbleUpon traffic is great, the button I was using, because it only links through to a review form, might not have been helping me, in fact it might have been a negative for gaining votes, reducing the amount your best content is shared with others.

Digg

None of my content is written specific to a Digg audience. I try to write good “in-depth” content and generally many of my articles are not appropriate for the mainstream Digg audience.

Those articles that are appropriate appear to hit a well known phenomena, as happened on my article on Digg friends (which wasn’t about gaming Digg) or my in-depth review of PayPerPost Direct.

My recent articles on WordPress SEO, contain far more valuable information than the majority of “SEO Tips” articles that seem to make the front page of Digg.
Digg users often have short attention spans, and seem to prefer Digging shorter articles – I am sorry but I am not going to write short articles just for traffic. If an article needs more words, I am going to use them.

I am going to continue including the Digg button, because eventually I believe some of my content might become more appreciated by a wider Digg audience.

Technorati Favorites

The button was duplicating something I already include in my sidebar. I will still be reciprocating, many people find it valuable and it is my way of adding people to various OPML tools I am playing with.
There wasn’t a need to have the button in quite such a prominent position.

I maintain my Technorati Favorites with EngTech’s Technorati Favorites tool, the version from 23/05/2007 is working currently (see comments) – remember to clean up your favorites.

An example of how I use the OPML from my Technorati Favorites is the meme I created on Megite for the Technorati Favetrain.

The only way to be added to this special meme is to add me to your Technorati Favorites, and I reciprocate automatically.

This is how I get to read so many blogs, and seem to appear on blogs all over the blogosphere that have interesting articles.

PlugIM – New Addition

I have been a member of PlugIM for quite a while, and have always found it to be a good source of quality articles focused primarily on internet marketing.

Whilst many people might look on this as some kind of duplication with Bumpzee and the affiliate marketing community there, there is actually only a partial overlap in readership, especially among the dedicated reader base.

PlugIM is very much a niche community, whereas Bumpzee caters for many different communities, one widget fits all.
There are currently hundreds of niche communities which utilise some form of voting script.

Many might look on them as being Digg clones.

If you are a Digg user, let’s be totally honest – do you want the hottest knitting pattern for this coming season (yeah knitters will be thinking about Winter clothing already) appearing on the front page of Digg?

Until Digg caters for all topic areas, there is room for clones. Knitting is probably a bigger niche than Tech industry news.

Now for me, PlugIM is appropriate for my niche, I think it deserves a spot in prime real estate.

I have been waiting a little while to mention Michelle’s PlugIM plugin

When it was first launched it didn’t have the flexibility I needed to position it in the “prime real estate” that I wanted, but it is there now.

It is also very “light” in coding, just 4kb, and I hope it doesn’t affect load time too heavily. It certainly won’t be a factor on single pages. My front page is probably going to change somewhat as I make a lot of SEO changes.

One great advantage of the PlugIM plugin is that once an article is already submitted (which happens automatically because they pick up your RSS feed), you don’t have to be logged into PlugIM to vote, or even be a member.

I am also a marketer – PlugIM is designed for marketers and isn’t selfish – when someone votes on your content, it doesn’t take them away from your website.

Bumpzee

Bumpzee stays

I get a huge amount of traffic from Bumpzee on a daily basis, many of my readers are active users, and I maintain one of the largest communities on Bumpzee for blogs that have removed nofollow from their comments area.

In many ways Bumpzee is more like a social network than a social news or bookmarking site.

Bumpzee is the most multi-purpose voting widget, because the service caters for any niche.

Del.icio.us

I am going to integrate something for Del.icio.us with my next major overhall. I find myself using it more frequently for content I really want to keep a bookmark of for future reference.
It is most likely going to be using Feedburner’s Feedflares.

Netscape

I know a few readers use Netscape, though I have seen only limited usage of it where it has been provided in Feeds for the last 6 months.

Someone browsing your site from Netscape might be doing it with a sidebar with a voting button, so in many ways providing a button is superfluous.

Other Services

I am always on the lookout for services that would be useful to add, which my readers would actually find useful. I can provide lots of different buttons using the hacked version of Sociable I use, if readers are going to use them.

If there is a social bookmark service that you actually use on a regular basis, and would like me to add, please let me know.

Facebook? Well I have included it in my feed for a long time, it doesn’t seem to be used

Other Optimization

I am going to start adding some additional optimization, such as custom greetings for each source of traffic.

Stumble Popup

How often do you read a great blog post and forget to share it with your friends? The Stumbleupon toolbar is often a long mouse move away, and most people don’t use shortcuts when browsing, because they can’t remember them, or because of conflicts between different toolbars and other applications that are running on a system by default.

You hold down the right mouse button and up pops some custom navigation

Then you just move your mouse slightly, either to navigate within your browser, or to do various things with Stumbleupon.

This is brand new software, so you would expect a few bugs or shortcomings.

• Registration – The registration procedure isn’t very automated, and requires you email a hardware key to them, and in return you are sent a registration code. Whilst having a human element in the chain limits people cheating the registration process, it does cause some inconvenience and confusion.
• Hotkeys – The software relies on sending hotkey information, and if you have a few popular toolbars, you are going to hit conflicts. In my case the hotkey to stumble something conflicts with Roboform, although that was easy to fix.

I strongly suggest you grab this software before they start charging for it. (and I am not making a penny from suggesting it)

Converting Traffic From Digg & Stumbleupon

There are so many articles about how to get traffic from Digg and Stumbleupon, but very few that analyze the difference in behaviour once you get traffic from a social media site.

Tim is one of the few people who has actually tackled the difference between Digg and Stumbleupon users and also how they interact with different page elements.
If you want to maximise the value you give to visitors from these services, and thus the benefit you receive, you should definitely read both articles multiple times.
Notice the emphasis – you have to give people what they want for them to take an action that is a benefit to you, such as:-

• linking to your article
• subscribing to RSS feed
• sharing your article with friends

Stumbleupon Friends

Stumbleupon isn’t just about gaining lots of traffic to your own sites, in many ways that is just a bonus of a little reciprocal stumbling of the blogs you read on a regular basis.
You should avoid “over-stumbling” the same domains – I have noticed that there can be a reduced effect of stumbles if the same people stumble the same domains all the time, even if they have powerful accounts.
I have learnt a lot about Stumbleupon from Maki – in the past I pointed my readers in the direction of his comprehensive guide to Stumbleupon.
Now Maki has written a followup which emphasises that not only can you gain traffic from using Stumbleupon on a regular basis, but you can also find lots of great content suggested by your friends.

How To Test The Effectiveness of Social Media Traffic?

This is something I am in the middle of setting up on my own sites, so I will have a more in-depth post coming soon.
My friend Alister Cameron has some interesting code set up on his site, that detects referrer traffic from various social media sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and offers them a different user experience, by simply asking them to take a different specific action.
You could also take a look at the landing sites plugin for inspiration (uses Google search terms) and my friend Rob over at Yack Yack also offered some code a few months ago for handling search queries.
I know many Digg and Reddit button display plugins also work by using the referring URL, so there is plenty of code to play around with.

What tools would you use to measure the traffic?

• Crazyegg – this is one of the obvious choices – you would be able to measure user activity using a heatmap
• Clickheat – this seems to be a great script you can host on your own server, and it is possible to do some quite sophisticated tracking with it, though you might hit performance issues if you go overboard.
  It would be possible to set this up not just as an A/B splittest, or multivariate, but also based on the source of the traffic.
• Google Analytics – you could probably do something with Google’s analytics which has just had it’s interface revamped, though my account is still set for the old interface. Extracting data from Google Analytics has always been fairly difficult, hopefully as they roll out the new version, things have improved.

You might think Clickheat is going overboard, but I know among my readers there are some very fanatical testers who would be quite happy to set up a dedicated server just to run a script like Clickheat, if it allowed them more granular testing results.

Here is the simple code you place on your pages

<script type="text/javascript" src="/clickheat/js/clickheat.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
clickHeatPage = 'ABC';
initClickHeat();
</script>
<noscript><a href="http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html" title="ClickHeat: clicks heatmap">clickheat</a></noscript>

ABC – you can make this as granular as you like, depending on the limits of your server hosting your tracking script. If you are just testing one sales page, you could easily change that to a source of traffic or adwords keyword group.
No Script – I would probably remove this link

It would certainly be possible to write a simple WordPress plugin to insert code based on a specific tracking code within your pages, or based upon a page ID or referring source.

I still have to test to see how well it works if you have multiple copies of the code on each page – with the current code (though it is GPL) there is no way to get specific birds-eye-view information based on groups of pages IDs.

The King Of Blogging Gobshites

About a month ago Gavin wrote a post about dofollow which I thought was remarkable, but not because of the content. The content was good, anyone talking about dofollow immediately gets a huge plus in my book, but the title he used for the post in my mind just hit a sweet spot, in a typically Irish way.

I Dont Trust Blogging Gobshites

I gave the post a Stumble just because of the title.

A month later Gavin has followed up the post with the following, and as intended it has piqued my vanity. I have been looking for the best opportunity to link through to him from a post that will actually give him hopefully even more traffic.

Andy Beard – The King of Blogging Gobshites

Actually the original post didn’t get a huge amount of Stumbleupon traffic, but even light Stumbleupon activity is far more significant than a couple of Diggs.

Quintuplet?

I decided as I had 5 things I wanted to talk about all on the same subject (Stumbleupon) to add it to Darren’s group writing project.
I don’t expect all of these items to be of interest to everyone, but I hope both beginners and my most advanced readers find something useful.