[Special guest post for Friday fun from none other than my daughter. No, really.]

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

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Out of all the online social networks I have tried, the one I always continue to use on a regular basis is Stumbleupon. Clicking that Stumble button is like a drug and many a hour has disappeared without a trace while I find sites that I wouldn’t normally have found without the aid of this amazing social network.

But to simply label Stumbleupon a social network where you can find other amazing websites belittles its other amazing potential. For example, I have noticed it starting to influence search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Could Stumbleupon’s human-filtered search results be the beginning of the next evolution of search engines that could see the all-powerful Google algorithim be made redundant?
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(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.

Surely, if you have ever posted anything to Digg that didn’t make the front page, you’ve been hit with comments such as lame, fail, old news, or something like that.

I’ve found that StumbleUpon has some interesting folks that expand quite a bit on their negative opinions. Take my recent post about the 16 personality types of StumbleUpon users. It was generally very well liked (23 reviews, 20 of which were positive), but if you take a look at the thumbs down reviews, you’ll find things like this one from TravisKab:

It’s nice to be able to sit back and laugh about this. Just so you all know, I really don’t feel compelled to pigeonhole myself as a personality type and frolic (spelling?) in traffic. But, I do like to take notice of interesting patterns in social media and spread the word about them. And strong opinions one way or the other make life far more interesting than zombies saying “nice post,” “lame,” or “I don’t like it”. By all means, keep the discussion going.

And hey, people that post positive reviews are also pretty verbose. Take this one from TheNanny612 for instance:

I do see the point of the couple of thumbs down reviews on the 16 personalities post. People were expecting a more thorough analysis of StumbleUpon users and felt that the Myers Briggs test was not substantial / accurate enough to be based upon. To this, I respond that this is a social media blog, not a psychology lab

Hey, if you want to do some grant writing, we put some stumblers in a sensory deprivation chamber for a while and see how they do. It’s still pretty good that StumbleUpon even has a spot for personality type unlike most social media stuff that is out there.

Here’s a different angle of looking at social media entirely - by personality type. In case you missed it, when you are filling out your profile in StumbleUpon, you can put what personality type you are. Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), there are 16 possibilities a person can be. There are lots of sites that have sample tests online, but here is the official foundation continuing the original work.

So, I’ve taken a sampling of top stumblers, social media mavens/addicts, and people I just plain find interesting. Here is what I found (personality type definitions credit - personalitypage.com):

The (E)xtroverts:

ENTP - The Visionaries (we’re the best, by the way )
nowsourcing
etcetera (top stumbler)
tnash

ENFJ - The Givers
barbarakb
noey

ENTJ - The Executives
waynesmallman

ESTP - The Doers
khook20

The (I)ntroverts:

INFP - The Idealists
gladius
vladtheaffiliate

ISTJ - The Duty Fullfillers
avigle
rustybrick

INTP - The Thinkers
bartthebear
flyingrose

INFJ - The Protectors
caile-girl (top stumbler)

If you haven’t put in your personality type in StumbleUpon yet, you’re missing out. This is an interesting item that tells more about you than that your interests include the Internet and computers