Social Media: StumbleUpon: It works!

Derek Haines loves StubleUpon and here's why:

My blog completely froze and gave me a ‘Page Cannot Be Loaded’ message. So off I went on an immediate hunt to find out why. It took me some time because I was looking in all the wrong places, and even if I had an inkling of the problem I wouldn’t have known how to go about remedying it anyway. Therefore I didn’t find the problem and decided to try another alternative. Wait half an hour and see what happened.

During that half an hour I popped into Stumbleupon by sheer chance. There at the top of my page was my problem. My server had been hit by over 1,500 visitors in less than fifteen minutes. Yes, from Stumbleupon. As my site is on a very normal everyday type server, this was a bit too much for it to handle. But what a nice problem to have.

Read the entire article over at Derek Haines' blog, The Vandal: Blogging -- The Stumbleupon Effect.

Lately I have been studying ways to drive traffic to my blog but hadn't seriously considered StumbleUpon and, if not for Derek's article, likely wouldn't have for quite some time. Thanks Derek! I think that reading other writer's blog posts is the most useful thing I do all day.

Another site that is worth checking out, if you haven't already, is reddit.com. I mentioned fark.com to someone the other day and they rolled their eyes at me.

"No one reads Fark anymore," they said with pitying condescension.

We'll see about that! I thought and marched home where I compared reddit.com to fark.com using Google Trends.

They were right! Well, not completely right, as you can see reddit.com is trending down as well, but, nevertheless, I was surprised by the result and learnt something.

My goal for the day is going to be to learn more about StumbleUpon.

Liebster Awards

Michael Haynes gave me a Liebster Award! I'm so excited. I actually did a silly little Scooby-dance.



It was just like this without the cool clothes and music. Honest!

Okay, maybe not.

After I finished my dance I wondered what the Liebster Award was. It was an award, yes, and therefore intrinsically good and something worthy of great excitement, but what was this Liebster bit about?

Apparently "liebster" is derived from a German term meaning, "a close friend." As I understand it, the award is given to a writer with a blog that has fewer than 200 followers.

Here are the rules of acceptance for the award:
1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog or sending them a tweet.
3. Post the award on your blog. (Right-click the image, above, and select "save image as").
4. Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the internet—other writers.
5. And best of all – have fun and spread the karma.

Without further ado, here are my picks:
- Kim Neville and her blog, Kim Neville: Faith, trust, pixie dust
- Kim Aippersbach and her blog, Dead Houseplants
- Martin Lastrapes and his blog, My Musings
- Jamie Sedgwick and his blog, Chronicles
- Shawn Hansen and his blog, Scribbled Stories

It was super hard picking just five. I ended up writing names on index cards, tacking them up on my wall, blindfolding myself and throwing darts randomly. I broke a window and gave my favorite top some ventilation, but it was worth it! Okay, maybe it didn't go quite like that but, still, picking the recipients was difficult.

Thanks Michael, this was fun!