(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.

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Google AdSense is putting together a very informative Webinar on AdSense features. Anyone interested in monetizing their blog, still learning the ropes, or just not on top of the latest features should attend this Wednesday, 9/19/07.

Also, if you’re not a member already, the Google AdSense group, “Inside AdSense”, you might want to join that as well (even though its activity has been low as of late).

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!

Now for the moment that we’ve all been waiting for. Many of us have speculated about the different reasons that Skype went down last week. Some said that it was caused by Russian Hackers, but Skype came out to deny this.

Skype needed to answer the world, though. If you read the Heartbeat blog today, you will see their official statement:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

Sounds like people need to modify their default Windows Update settings. Or do you all think that this is a cover-up answer? Interested in hearing your thoughts on this one.

I’ve been following Skype’s progress very closely over the past 24 hours, and according to their blog, Villu Arak reports:

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Vilu goes on to speak to all of the speculation going on for this extended outage:

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

I’m glad that Skype has made an attempt to dispell myths that have been circulating.

On my end (as of 10:30am EST), I’ve finally been able to have my first successful Skype messaging back up! Very happy to see the service running again - didn’t realize how dependent people are on it. Everyone else back up and running? Let me know!