Yes, as you can tell by the title of this article, I’m still unhappy about getting banned by Digg for no reason that I can find other than overt censorship. I’m further annoyed because Digg administrators have chosen to ignore my emails and it’s now been almost two weeks of patiently waiting.
I’m out of patience. A few days ago I chose to remove all remnants of Digg buttons from this site, all Digg links except one, and I even had the audacity to pester at least one Digg stockholder, but he and his cronies refuse to debate me openly on an Ismaili website.
“We do not take open-ended questions, comments or contentious observations.”
Who could blame them, really; I wouldn’t want to debate me either.
So, how do I fight back against such a monolithic titan of a web presence like Digg.com? That’s easy: I find something better and then I tell you about it. I must resist the urge to get angry about all this, because after all, I still remember the old saying: “Don’t get mad — get even.”
Exhibit A:
The above graphic details something quite interesting to me this morning: StumbleUpon gets results. I have the industrious blogger 1389 to thank for making this little bump in my traffic stats in just over one day on StumbleUpon, and that’s just mainly from one submitted article! The obviously big blip (+3367%!) that appears here as my strongest rising referral source, even overtaking Google, makes me a new believer in the power and the sheer fun that comes along with using StumbleUpon. And best of all, it’s easier to use and more productive than Digging, and you don’t have to worry about the “Bury Brigade” or censor-happy administrators with a slanted political agenda and low-brow taste.
So, if you’ve been in the dark all this time, much as I have been myself, as to what StumbleUpon is and how to utilize it, let me enlighten you today.
“Stumbleupon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been stumbled upon by other web-users.” - BBC World
“Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it.” - The Wall Street Journal
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great blogs and websites. As you click the “thumbs up”, StumbleUpon delivers high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages are recommend by other websurfers and friends that you add to your StumbleUpon account over time. All in all, it’s the perfect way to recommend valuable and entertaining points on the Internet and others help you find more great websites as a result.
It’s really that simple, and that popular. I have loaded the bar into my Firefox browser and it works very well and I can hide it out of the way when I’m not using it by simply pressing CNTRL + F11 on my keyboard at the same time. Want it back? Press the same combination again.
You can also find StumbleUpon links here at the Anvil even if you do not use the toolbar. On individual articles (and most pages including the homepage) there’s a large StumbleUpon button on the right sidebar near the top that can’t be missed. And beneath every single article is the Share This icon that opens up more than 14 options for promoting something here that you deem worthy, including submitting to StumbleUpon, as well as emailing the article to friends.
So, help me thumb my nose at the Digg “Bury Brigade” today, won’t you? Just StumbleUpon some articles here at the Anvil and then surf off to other interests; you never know what other reading you might find as a result.
Sources of Note: Omidyar Network Leadership, Omidyar Network and relationship with Digg.com
Addendum: Why StumbleUpon ‘Owns’ Digg, Virtual Schrödinger’s Law
Podcasts Archive
Well, I’m very glad you “stumbled” in and even more glad to hear more confirmation of the superiority of StumbleUpon to Digg.
And just for added icing, as of 10:14 AM this morning my unique visitors count is already at 1082 for the day and the vast majority of these referrals are still coming from StumbleUpon!
B-bye, Digg.
Stumbleupon has always been better than digg in terms of the quality of sites and the visitors. People who stumble tend to be a lot more easy going and know they are just out to have fun. Not some strange political, mombojumbo of digg.
I say do the search challenge, use digg search vs a stumbleupn search (the little magnifying glass thing) and try the first 10 random SU vs first 10 digg results. You will know which service is better for showing you the best websites.
I don’t know why you got banned, i don’t care, i just stumbled in. All i do know is that digg is a boring waste of time, where stumbleupon is much more fun
Well, “stumbling” is part of the fun!
Easy for you to say, FH! My PC knowledge would fit into a
thimble, compared to what you know!
This new thing could take me days to master. I have seen
some MSM sites that have it.
Well, “stumbling” is part of the fun!
I tried to post yesterday, but couldn’t
I joined up at “stumbleupon” and am stumbling throught it
lol! (Not sure I know what I am doing as yet).
Anyway, I put all my favs in, including this site and Dr
Bulldog’s.
Ah, I thought I was going insane there for a minute when that smilie code changed between me opening one page and editing another. Glad you cleared that up. I’m just testing to make sure all the intricacies of this this plugin are working correctly.
PS And as it turns out, that just helped me clear up an issue with default smilies. Now when someone uses a standard smilie code, it should be automatically translated to the appropriate image, no need to choose that smilie from the quicktags window.
Thanks, I see the difference. I understand why all site owners would want more traffic, but having those feeds lets me see at a glance which sites have been updated since I last visited, and visit only the updated ones: in other words, improves efficiency. From the site owners’ POV, it does force them to keep updating content if they want repeat visitors from this subset of the readership.
P.S. I edited the smileys on my post from
to 
- first icon had that banner, which looked wierd.
RSS is syndication. It’s a great way to get a feed from a site, yes. Does it give you the opportunity to find fresh sites that others vote on? No. Does it allow you to promote sites you want others to see. No. Does it help someone like me promote my own site, to some degree yes, but also it keeps quite a few people from actually visiting my site because of the convenience of RSS, so that’s also not exactly working to my advantage.
The blogger’s life blood is traffic. StumbleUpon is like Gatorade. Digg is like bad beer.
So, do I encourage people to click that Subscribe button and use a superior browser like Firefox to enhance their enjoyment of the Anvil, absolutely. Do I also hope people will use a service like StumbleUpon to help boost my traffic — ABSOLUTELY. Will all of these things be worthwhile. Well, I use them myself and I definitely don’t like wasting my own time or anyone else’s so I think I just asked a rhetorical question.
It’s all simply up to the individual websurfer to decide what’s best for them, beyond that no webmaster or blogger can do anything but hope for the best and keep working.
I’ve never ‘digged/dugg’ - ever since I first saw it, so won’t have to get off that habit.
What exactly is it, or StumbleUpon? Generally, when I subscribe to a site’s RSS news feeds, such as this one, in FireFox (and Netscape 9, which is the same as Firefox 2.x), I get the option of adding that to my toolbar, so that each news item shows up in a pull-down menu. While IE7 claims to support RSS, there is no way one can get feeds on to the links bar the way one can under Firefox, thereby defeating the whole idea of feeds (I mean who needs it if you need a separate reader, or you can’t at a glance tell all the headlines from a pull down menu, and choose which one to go to?
So is one’s news browsing incomplete without Digg or StumbleUpon? I thought RSS was pretty adequate. Or am I talking apples and pineapples?
@Dr. Bulldog: Well, someone that uses StumbleUpon has heard of you — you’re already in the system being given the “thumbs up” by readers. I added mine to the pile.
I had never heard of stumbleupon before, but Gramfan sent me an email with to your “bury digg.com” article. After checking it out, it looks like a great idea. I’m going to give it a try.
Cheers
@American-qaida: Now why in the world would I help your traffic by linking to that moonbat-crossbred-with-an-Islamist site?
this is my blog
it talks about Al-Qaida and how I think it as an american orgnisation
Al-Qaida
can we backlink each other?
No ‘diggin’ for me.
The FHK blog is just getting started, and has not yet reached the legendary status of the Anvil,
but we are also seeing good results in terms of blog traffic with referrals from Stumbleupon.