If you haven't heard of StumbleUpon, you should really check it out. Here is a blurb that brifly explains what it is:
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 4,493,158 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
While StumbleUpon is a great supplement to using search engines, the real benefit comes in the ability to cheaply test sites or blogs to see whether or not they are any good. You can drive visitors with specific interests to your site for just $0.05per person. (Check out StumbleAds) When people stumble across your site they have the ability to give the site a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Within about a day or so you can look at the percentage of likes to dislikes to get an idea of what people think of your site. This is also a great way to just get some initial traffic to a new site or blog. I have used this method to bolster readership of our corporate blog. It's cheap and it works.
**One caveat is that the content of the blog or site should be useful or educational -- not just a site selling products. I have found that StumbleUpon works best with blogs or free viral content.
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7 comments:
I like this method. It generates feedback from web users and at the same time allows them to express their opinions. Even though I have seen this method plenty of times before, it are a good move solely on the purpose to allow users to critique your creation so that the developer can modify it until it is likable….I guess. Stumbleupon says that “they deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences” so I take it that that is a gateway for a homogenous network to link up and share ideas.
I recently downloaded the Stumbleupon Firefox extension, but I haven't actually tried it out just yet. The idea takes the user generated content model that drives sites like Amazon and applies it to web sites. In this way it is part of the long tail approach. I think this kind of an application is long overdue. The majority of Internet users are using Google and Yahoo, but how do you know the search results are really what you are looking for. Google's algorthym is good, but I would be interested to see a study that compares the top search results on Google to the highest ranked sites on StumbleUpon. Even if Google's math is the best around, they are still only to index an extremely small portion of the Web. StumbleUpon also slightly reminds me of Digg, but it uses a broader approach.
To continue a bit from my previous comment, StumbleUpon seems like a great resource not only for the average web user, but for developers as well. The suggestion to use StumbleUpon to test your own site or blog will really come in handy and provide excellent, direct feedback from actual users. What could be more valuable than that?
I had not heard of StumbleUpon but have joined since it was mentioned in your blog. There needs to be more options to search for websites instead of the big search engines. The feedback from users gives this service a more humanistic approach,rather then mathematical algorithms used in search engines. This would be a great way to get your websites out and see what constructive criticism the members of this service would give to help you make a better site. Ideas can be shared amongst people with same interests as you, which would be quite beneficial
Thanks for the comments guys. Cooper and Scott, your points that social search needs to be incorporated more into search engines is spot on. Even Google understands that they need to figure this into their algorithm somehow; the trick being to do it in a way that cannot be manipulated by webmasters to overly inflate their site's popularity. Here is an article that talks a little about this http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/31/googles-marissa-mayer-social-search-is-the-future/
I like the idea of StumbleUpon. I agree with Cooper's statement about how this process is similar to the Longtail. Everyone has a chance to give feedback as well as find sites they may not have found otherwise. I think it will be great for smaller Web sites and sites with niche audiences. I also think it'll be a great alternative search tool. Using this tool will allow for finding information Google et al may not give the user.
The reason I have heard of StumbleUpon, is via YouTube. I have a few things posted there and have checked to see who is linking to the videos. A few of them have been through StumbleUpon, I had no idea this was a search engine. I'm intrigued, I will have to investigate it further.
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