The Traffic Content Marketing ‘Can’ Send

You are probably aware of what content marketing (or social promotion) is, and just how much traffic promoting your content socially can drive. If you are not as familiar with content marketing and its value in your online marketing strategies, then check out the two articles below before reading on: 7 Reasons to Include Content Marketing … [more]

December 21, 2011 | Filed Under Digg, Reddit, Social Media, StumbleUpon, Viral Marketing | Leave a Comment

Recap of New Features from Digg and StumbleUpon

While at Pubcon, WebProNews caught up with me and we did a quick interview.

We discussed the new trending feature on Digg and the beta changes to StumbleUpon’s complete site.

Enjoy:

0 Recap of New Features from Digg and StumbleUpon picture

December 3, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences, Digg, Social Media, StumbleUpon | Leave a Comment

The New StumbleUpon V4… Less Content, More Social

I have raved a lot over the last year about the changes that StumbleUpon has made since it launched it’s 3rd version of the site in November 2008.

The new design brought in a more content focused StumbleUpon, with category pages, recommended content on the review pages, easier discovery of content, share features, increase friends cap, and many other changes that allowed users a better opportunity to see more quality content.

With all the changes, we saw the number of StumbleUpon users jump drastically (up to over 8 million) and the amount of traffic sent to submitted content was so large that I ended up publishing an article calling it the Stumble Effect, since it dropped one of my servers.

Since they decided to purchase their company back from Ebay, we are now looking at a complete redesign again, but is it all that it is cracked up to be? Lets take a look at StumbleUpon V4: The Friend Maker.

If you read the announcement they posted last week about the coming change, here is what they indicated as the basic coming changes:

Redesign more simple, searchable, and social
Easier to use
Improved site and user profile navigation
Improved search based on user ratings and reviews
Increased ability to find real-life friends or people living around you

The coming changes in StumbleUpon V4 really focus on connecting with friends and seeing what things they like.
Read more

October 13, 2009 | Filed Under StumbleUpon | Leave a Comment

StumbleUpon Lag Issue Finally Solved

Over 6 months ago I blogged asking StumbleUpon to please stop lagging me.

Ever since they had launched their redesign into beta, I was being plagued with insane performance issues in which my entire browser would lag to an almost stand-still after visiting my profile or inbox at StumbleUpon.

Here is a video capture I took of the toolbar freaking out. You can get an idea of the lag it causes by how slowly the bar is jumping to the right and back.

Flickr Video

Of course I was in constant communication with some StumbleUpon folks who worked on the toolbar, and they would try their best to understand the issue. They released many potential fixes, but indicated since they could not recreate the problem, it was hard to offer a solution.

During the recent release of a new toolbar build, StumbleUpon mentioned some adjustments to their options, so I went to take a look at the new changes.

It was then that I noticed the ‘prefetch stumbles’ option, which I had turned on many months earlier.

prefetch StumbleUpon Lag Issue Finally Solved picture

Note the option indicated that it ‘makes stumbling faster’…

It then occurred to me that if I had some 20+ browser windows open (which I often do) and they were all trying to pre-load multiple pages each, then it would probably cause the lag that I was experiencing.

Sure enough, as soon as I turned this option off, I never had the ‘stumble lag’ again.

I quickly shot a message over to the guys at StumbleUpon and got the following response:

“40-50 windows? Yeah, that could do it. Hadn’t even considered that scenario.”

So if anyone else out there is struggling with an unexplained super lag and you happen to have the ‘prefetch stumbles’ option on, at least you know what the problem is now.

September 9, 2009 | Filed Under Social Media, StumbleUpon | Leave a Comment