The Consumer’s Corner

Do you ever sit up late at night on the internet, really bored? You’ve checked out all of your favorite websites, some of them twice, and there’s just nothing left to do? Wish there was some way to ‘channel surf’ the internet, like your TV? Not just randomly either, but surf in a way that your beloved computer knows what you like to look at, goes out and finds it especially for you, and then delivers it straight to your screen at the simple push of a button? Yeah? You do? Well, you’re lazy.

Totally kidding. But that fantasy service does really exist, and it’s called StumbleUpon!, or Stumble for short. Stumble is a tool bar that attaches to your browser, Internet Explorer and Firefox (Safari as well? I don’t know, comment me.). You register your account, it’ll ask a few questions about about things you’re interested in, and off you go.

Clicking the ‘Stumble’ button on the tool bar will send you to a site that the service thinks matches your interest criteria. Once you’ve Stumbled, if you like the site you land on, you can (and should) click the ‘Thumbs Up’ button on the bar. If the site sucks, you click ‘Thumbs Down.’ Really complicated stuff, huh? Over a period of time, the program ‘learns’ (it’s smart!) your likes and dislikes, and will more consistently send you to more sites that you’ll love, and fewer that you’ll detest.

You already have favorite sites, right? Go ahead and give them the ‘Thumbs Up,’ this increases those sites ranking with the service, and let’s Stumble know you like that type of material. If it’s never been ‘Thumbed’ before, you can write a brief review of it, tag it to certain interests, ect. There are communities to join where you can share your favorite bookmarks with like minded people, see what the other friendly folks like you have to offer, and so on.

Oh yeah, if you enjoyed this article and end up trying Stumble out, you’ll come back and give Consumer’s Corner the ‘Thumbs Up.’ If you really, really love it, you click the title of each of your favorite articles and ‘Thumb’ that sub page, as well. This helps promote the site, a site you obviously like or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I’m not begging or anything (please, PLease, pretty PLEEEAAASSSEEE!!!!).

They’ve recently added video and picture services (and more) as well, but I’m kind of scared to play with those. I might never leave my computer. Anyway, it’s free, so try it out, and see how it works for you. I’ll never have another browser without it.

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

stumble, stumleupon, social bookmarking, web 2.0

This is a blog, and I’m very well aware that the greatest number of my readers are bloggers as well; a great many of them authoring smaller blogs like mine. As small bloggers, we know that traffic is just incredibly hard to come by unless you’re lucky enough catch a break or two. Now there is a service that’s been designed to help offer that break; BloggingZoom.

Upon first glance, BloggingZoom looks like just another Digg or Reddit clone. The major difference I see is their submission policies; most other social bookmarking services will discourage you from submitting your own content, going as far as to ban their users for doing so. Not BloggingZoom. They’re very open, and that’s a strategy that will help everyone; them, bloggers, and readers. In time BloggingZoom should become a very diverse community, with tons of useful and unique information.

BloggingZoom is built for bloggers, by bloggers, and they truly appreciate the difficulties of driving traffic to your site. With this in mind, they not only have no problem with you submitting your own content/articles, they encourage you to submit them. All of them. On top of that, the system is designed to help your article get ranked higher is Google, offering you residual traffic. Burst traffic is great, but I’d rather have ten new returning visitors than one burst of one hundred hits from people I’ll never see again.

I’d personally recommend limiting your submissions to BloggingZoom to your best stuff only, stuff that you’d really like to showcase to a broad audiance. Why? The whole idea of social bookmarking is to build a sustainable readership. So you should put your best foot forward, not filler articles. Just my opinion though.

One more thing, another huge difference between BloggingZoom and ‘Diggesque’ sites is no mainstream media allowed! That really gives us ‘little guys’ a fighting chance. I’m registered and ready to go, and very curious to see how successful this service is going to be. Check them out! And Zoom this article!

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

social bookmarking, blogging, generating traffic

A great article from Grizzly on the same topic!