Blogrush has just released the long awaited Phase II, on Halloween no less. I knew that their orange and black color scheme was no coincidence

And I must say, the upgrade isn’t half bad. Maybe I’m just saying that because I was sick of seeing that work in progress graphic and partial stats, but some of the new tools in here make Blogrush appear to be worth a second look.

When you login to the new version, you will see a link to the walkthrough video of Phase 2. If you don’t feel like sitting through a 20 minute video, I’ve put together a summary of what I thought the best features are. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but here we go:

Improved Dashboard

There are now cleaner graphs representing your traffic as well as your referral traffic. What I like best about the dashboard is a report on your most recent posts:

These stats show how many impressions and readers each of your posts have had, as well as a buzz measurement. This buzz is based off of how popular your story was in relation to other stories from all BlogRush bloggers in you niche. It isn’t 100% clear where all the data comes from on this, but it is an interesting concept. Perhaps it can shed a little light for you to see which of your blog post titles are most effective to the BlogRush audience.

There is also a reports page for you to drill down and see traffic under the date range of your choice. Andy Beard had a great statistical post about Blogrush traffic before, and I hope he does more analysis now that Phase 2 has rolled out.

Filters

Unless I missed this one before, you now have the ability to filter out specific posts from your blog. This is good if you post an occasional off topic to your readership. Would have worked nicely when I was writing about the Lymphoma benefit party at SMX New York.

Future Improvements

Some things that I’d still like to see come out of Blogrush:

Actual Traffic!

These questions aren’t really addressed in the FAQ.

It looks like the jury is still out on Blogrush. Now, I turn the question to you, the reader - does their Phase II candy suck?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

(image credit: invent)

With all the attention that Google Pagerank is getting now *yawn*… it’s a good time to talk of about the effectiveness of StumbleUpon.

SU has really been on a tear lately. According to Alexa, Stumbleupon has never ranked higher in its history, currently ranked 170 . It is also becoming more mainstream, now having over 3.7 million users (consider they only had 1 million in July 2006).

When I started writing this post, I was only going to talk about the StumbleUpon Toolbar Update for Firefox. If you’ve used Firefox recently, you’ve probably been prompted to install the latest toolbar update. Not sure about you, but I don’t like not knowing about what I’m upgrading. So the geek in me did a little digging and I came across the StumbleUpon for Firefox Changelog.

The update is worth it - see the StumbleUpon Blog’s report on SearchReviews:

You can now see who the friend that thumbed up each page in the SERPS.

Also while doing some research on this article, I came across the Unofficial StumbleUpon FAQ. There is some pretty good information on this page, such as giving premium users the ability to create their own groups (you might be surprised how effective a good group can be).

Here are some further resources to help your StumbleUpon knowledge:

StumbleUpon Help Forum

StumbleUpon Beta Toolbars

Here is a good pictorial on how StumbleUpon actually works:

click on the image for a larger version (h/t arleas)

As social media and (quality) blogging now allow sites to rank very quickly, it will be interesting to see how this all pans out. Especially with a more level PR playing field.

(image credit - tycity)

The more I use and observe social media, the more it seems like psychology to me. I had the pleasure of attending SMX New York last week, and one of the highlights of it for me was listening in on the panel featuring the founders of Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Something that really got me into thinking was in the Q&A section where a member of the audience asked Garrett Camp, founder of StumbleUpon, on how SU dealt with spam. The answer was basically that the system eventually corrects itself. People flock to good content and it continues to rise, while mediocre content will eventually fail. Anyone attempting to game the system will reach a level where it cannot go any further and the general community will give it a thumbs down. So, the key point here is to have authoritative content, not a power profile. Power profiles might get your content noticed, but at the end of the day, it will still get thumbed down on StumbleUpon.

This got me to thinking more about flocking behavior. Craig Reynolds was the first to simulate this behavior using computer graphics in 1986. The basic steps of flocking consist of separation, alignment, and cohesion. These simulations mimic the movement of real life flocks of birds very well (created by Paul Richmond):

Try out the simulation - you can even fire a gun to scatter the birds.
Similarly in Digg, your network of friends can only drive a post so far - if you ever hope to reach the front page (which may lead to the Digg Effect, if you aren’t careful). Once reaching the front page, you will see a notable flocking effect. It’s pretty cool to see this visually - check out the Digg Swarm set to popular some time, and it will look something like this:

A computer can’t think like a person. You can program a computer to mimic human response, but this falls short. The concept of artificial artificial intelligence, such as the Human Turk attempts to have humans fill in the subjective gaps for machines, but this is still human operated.

Similarly, E-Commerce sales promotion cannot convey all the dimensions of a product. Smelling, tasting and touching an item we want to buy is more meaningful than just seeing an item and being able to rotate it online.

Communication with people over the Internet also limits the depths of our relationships. Yes, it is fun and easy to chat and email with friends, but there is a human element that is missing. You can’t pick up body language, and unless you’re in audio/video, you will miss tone and perhaps never even see what people really look like.

So, how does all of this apply to the SMX Social Media New York?
You will get top notch liveblog updates of the SMX event on some of these sources:

Aim Clear Blog

Search EngineJournal

SearchEngineLand, care of Vanessa Fox

SearchEngineRoundtable as liveblogged by Tamar (see some of my questions to Garrett Camp, co-founder and chief architect of StumbleUpon)

Still, reading about what happened at the event can’t be compared to actually being there. I communicate with a lot of people online every day. Email, instant messaging, Twitter, you name it. Since this was my first SMX event, although I’ve chatted with many of those in the field, I did not know these people from face-to-face interaction or anything beyond their avatar. Meeting with folks like Tamar and Marty has been a great experience. Watching Tamar’s level of anxiousness and excitement on her first speaking event and hearing more about Marty’s survival through cancer are lost in translation. Connecting on a deeper level strengthens the bonds that we have with our contacts and friends. Looking forward to speaking with you all on our final day of the conference!

(photo credit - idesign)

As previously stated, I’m heading off to the SMX Social Media 2 day conference in New York. You might ask, “Why on earth would someone spend over $1,000 just to sit around for 2 days in a conference?” I’ll tell you why.
Strengthen your network. Sure, everyone goes for networking. Pure networking events are a cheap, vapid date. Make the most of your time not just blitzing to see who can get the most business cards, but rather to establish quality contacts. For folks that you already know - perhaps you’ve never met them face-to-face before. Take the time to build your network, brick by brick.

Who here likes money? Let’s face it - an event like SMX doesn’t just bring in Social Media experts, but it also attracts the attention of major businesses - ones that have the deep pockets to afford your world-class services

Take notes like a beast, and be humble. Don’t think you know everything. If you’ve ever been a programmer, you know that there is someone that always knows more. Same goes for social media - especially in the fact that many of these systems are new and not fully fleshed out in both deployment and feature documentation.

We’re all pieces of the puzzle in social networking. It is important to note that you may know something that even the seasoned professional does not. Share the love and work together, and you may be pleasantly surprised. Small bits of info shared at these conferences can prove to be very useful. Know-it-all folks need not apply.