Stumbling voyeur

I wish to tell you a tale of how the on-line world can suck you in, it all started when I joined the Stumbleupon beta group you can to! The beta group gets to try out all the great new things like the new user interface, it also give you new buttons to press! and here is where it all went wrong…

As you can see the new interface is a much more polished feel to it then the old one, it also now made some features that were perhaps buried more easily accessible one of them is “stumble sites they like” button so now you can start going through other stumblers likes and dislikes all your secrets are mine muhuhhhhaaaa

Sorry momentary lose of sanity, stumblers are interesting folks and what is great is we can actually test several theories about stumblers habits by watching a stumbler as they make their way through the web! So lets see what we can tell but first some volunteers (I use the term volunteer loosely I will let my volunteers know that they have been subject to tests probably just after they finish read about it

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Lyndoman

An SEO consultant who also writes on his blog Cornwall SEO I will let you detectives work out where in the world he is based but what sort of things does Lyndon like to stumble and do they fit a pattern?

• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book - hmm surprised?
• Better Fonts - Good font resource
• Poker Comic - Hey made me laugh to (note how I photo blogged it)
• Cut out multitasking and improve efficiency - My head hurts does that make me productive?
• Secrets of the H1 tag - What an interesting article did you write it?

So what did we learn, the guy has a sense of humour, he like good resources and he is into SEO, their were some ads on a few of the sites but nothing to intense in short I’m afraid we didn’t learn much though I did get to add something to my stumbleupon photo blog.

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Andy Beard

Andy specialises in niche marketing and is primarily based out in Poland but has a business here in the UK, his blog is called Niche Marketing like our first volunteer he is a regular stumbler and has written several posts about Stumbleupon.

• Time Break of modern web design - Already have this as a poster
• Favourite procrastination hacks - I will comment but I just need to finish…
• The best headlines are not written for Digg - certainly not these days
• Utilising social media for Australian websites - interesting article
• Top 5 steps for picking a blog theme - another really interesting article

Andy stumbles are a little more focused then Lyndons is this a sign that he is using Stumbleupon more for work then pleasure or just that we took such a small sample?

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Darren Rowse

The king of paid bloggers and perhaps one of the most famous bloggers out there, so its surprising he has only had an account on stumbleupon since February (and he still has more friends then me!). For those who don’t know you can check out more about Darren at problogger.net his small home.

• 11 Tips for better candid photography - sort of appropriate I think
• Technorati Popular blogs - hey we may all be checking here some day
• Undisciplined productivity - Interview with Darren
• Taking professional photos - nice article on Macro photography
• 20 Largest social bookmarking services - nice list of sites for traffic

Again another focused list of the two main parts of Darrens work (Money bloging and Digital photography blog) I didn’t include the photo of the jet I just couldn’t think of a title.

So there you have it I’ve sunk to the lowest deeps of on-line voyeurism right now I’m looking through the sordid URLs of Creepygirl439 but this post did have a point and that is be careful what you stumble, just like all your social bookmarking sites everything is public but I think many people feel partly because the toolbar removes them from the site itself that when they press that little thumbs up, that no one will know.

I really do recommend looking through peoples stumbles its a great source of targeted inspiration and ideas as such I leave you with one last URL found during a stumble for this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/st_badideas.html

Photos from Stumbleupon

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