StumbleUpon, a popular social media site, is a fantastic way to “channel surf” through the web. The StumbleUpon folks were intelligent to set up the system the way that did. Ebay thought so too, having recently purchased them for $75 million.
So, what’s the secret feature, you ask? First off, StumbleUpon has a much more thorough Help page than most social networking sites, but as with any good help page, there will always be more to add.
If you have ever had someone review something that you Stumbled, you will see something like this:
(If you’re wondering about the context of this review, this stumbler was reviewing my article about Google Sky being released).
I have seen a notable difference in the popularity of my stumbles that I selected helpful reviews vs. not selecting them. Has anyone else seen similar results? Perhaps there is also some added benefit from others rating your reviews, bringing you closer to Top Stumbler status? Look for a future post from me to go into further stats comparing the results.
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Many of us have come across LinkedIn at some point or another. You may have heard about it through a friend of colleague, added a contact or 2, and then let your account lay dormant. If you ever hope to promote yourself and/or your blog, you have to get up and get involved!
To get you started, here is a link to my LinkedIn profile - feel free to add me to your network!
(I’ve permanently added it to the sidebar as well, which I hope will be a time saver for you.)
“The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven.
The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes.
There are some drawbacks to LinkedIn:
Aside from the LinkedIn answers section, the site is missing RSS feeds. It would make sense for me to view my contacts, their activities, an invitations to others not yet accepted instead of logging in to the site all the time.
A better way to opt out. It still is pretty annoying that you need to email customer service to have your account closed. Seems like enough people have disliked this method that LinkedIn would take some action.
RSS feeds can be added. Customer service can be improved. The point here is that LinkedIn has become a bona fide service that is worth participating in.
Some of the features of 2.3 include plugin and core update notification, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.
However all of the new functionality is still very rough, so only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously.
These sound like great updates. Couple of things, though:
You don’t have to worry about any of this if your blog is Wordpress hosted - only if you have a Wordpress blog that you host elsewhere. For more information on what that means, read my previous post on different blog platform.
To reiterate Matt, if you aren’t comfortable with technical issues, you shouldn’t install this Wordpress update.
Most places that you can host Wordpress blogs will not have the latest version of Wordpress, and for sure not a Beta version.
Back up your entire blog and database. In the past, trying to upgrade Wordpress wipes out your blog.
Until we hear that this is a somewhat stable version, it may make the most sense to set up a sandbox blog, just installing this new beta somewhere aside from your main blog.
We’ll be testing Wordpress 2.3 Beta out over here, and will be presenting our review of the updates later this week. Stay tuned!
Yahoo really is working on some interesting things. People just give Yahoo less focus now because of all the Google things going on (well deserved, mind you) such as Google Earth’s new Google Sky.
In any case, Yahoo Audio Search has a very friendly interface. Search as you would on any site, and the search results will have a play button in-line with the search results. You can click right on them for an instant sample stream. No waiting or going to ad stuffed sites.
Of course, it won’t come up with an audio sample for all songs and not for lesser known artists. Still, this is a great step in terms of the maturity of search.
For those of you that are big fans of Google Earth, this should be a big treat for you. Google has released a Beta version of Google Sky yesterday, giving users the ability to look around space in the same familiar Google Earth interface.
To use Google Sky in Google Earth, click on View -> Switch to Sky or click on the Sky button. Here is an instructional video released from Google that goes into further detail about its features:
Move over street view, here comes lunar craft view!
StumbleUpon, a popular social media site, is a fantastic way to “channel surf” through the web. The StumbleUpon folks were intelligent to set up the system the way that did. Ebay thought so too, having recently purchased them for $75 million.
