STARTonomics is NEXT Thurs 10/2 in SF (seats going fast, register now b4 we sell out...)
Master of 500 Hats — Hope you folks are registered for STARTonomics next Thursday 10/2 in SF... if not, hurry up & register now, FOOL!  we've had a rush of signups in the last few days, so get in now before we sell out. here's a preview of our speakers & sessions for next week: ...

Sharing My Love For Shiny Objects In Orlando
SOMEWHAT FRANK — ... details Storage Evernote - A digital dropbox with a desktop, Web and mobile component - more Evernote details MyDropBin - A digital storage interface for Amazon S3 Storage - more MyDropBin details Content Discovery & Sharing Mixx - Social news - more Mixx details Digg - Social news Delicious - Social bookmarking StumbleUpon - Content discovery Shareaholic - A consolidated sharing extension for ...

StumbleUpon Set For Resurgence With Web Toolbar, Partner Program
TechCrunch — Recommendation engine StumbleUpon has been facing some tough times lately: earlier this month we reported that eBay was looking to sell the startup less than 18 months after acquiring it (the company refuses to comment). And its traffic has been showing signs of stagnation (though the number of registered users to steadily rise). But tonight, the site is launching a new feature that may very well turn things around: a long awaited install-free web toolbar. Update: CEO Garrett Camp says that usage of the service isn’t ...

StumbleUpon tears down the plug-in wall, lets in the masses
VentureBeat — Using the web site discovery service StumbleUpon right now is kind of like driving a hot convertible with the top up. It’s a cool car, and having the top on gives you better performance, but it’s just not quite as sexy. That top is akin to StumbleUpon’s toolbar web browser plug-in, which you currently must use to use the service. But tonight, StumbleUpon is dropping the top and letting the sun in. The new version of StumbleUpon is all about accessibility — by anyone, anywhere. While it’s not getting rid of the plug-in toolbar entirely, you no longer need it thanks to ...

StumbleUpon Offers New Options Beyond Their Toolbar
ReadWriteWeb — This past weekend we asked for your help in predicting whether eBay would sell StumbleUpon. We hope that the rumors aren't true. If they are, StumbleUpon isn't rolling over and playing dead. It seems StumbleUpon may give eBay a reason to hold that thought. The service is looking to expand their offerings beyond their toolbar with two big new services today. Sponsor Stumble Beyond the Toolbar Today StumbleUpon has introduced a way for new visitors of the service to Stumble without the toolbar. To make discovering new sites easier, the service has ...

StumbleUpon - Now Without a Browser Plugin
Mashable! — ... StumbleUpon is a pretty unique site as far as social browsing sites go; no site with a similar concept (i.e. one click ‘random’ surfing through sites recommended by the community) has reached anywhere near its level of popularity. However, unlike - for example - Digg or Delicious, it requires users to do one extra step: install a browser plugin, which is something many users look down upon. ...

StumbleUpon Intros No Browser-Installation Feature
(Obsolete Feed) — Despite having not too much noise during the time that it has been operating, StumbleUpon managed to survive the test of times and was able to gain followers and users. In fact, the StumbleUpon site its number of stumblers to around 6,089,710 already. Despite this numbers though, StumbleUpon still has not managed to emerge as a major player in the “site discovery” niche. One thing that in a way hinders SU’s gain of popularity is the fact that some would just not want to install the StumbleUpon browser toolbar. Not until now. StumbleUpon is introducing a new feature which would ...

StumbleUpon relaunches: No browser toolbar necessary
Download Squad — ... StumbleUpon may be one of the most innovative social website discovery services around. But the service has always had one major stumbling block: users needed to sign up for accounts and install a browser toolbar. And some percentage of potential users are just ...

The Top 10 RWW Stories in September; Summaries and Follow Up
ReadWriteWeb — Do you remember what was happening one month ago in web technology? On September 1st the only story on most of our minds was the news of a Goolge browser, Chrome, which would be released the next day. Chrome was a big story last month, but it wasn't the only big news by a long shot. Below we summarize and follow up on the 10 most-read stories on ReadWriteWeb in the month of September. These aren't necessarily the best stories, but they are the most popular. We hope you enjoy this little trip down short-term memory lane. Do these posts already feel like old news to you, our hyper savvy readers? ...

eBay Won’t Take Less Than $75 Million For StumbleUpon
TechCrunch — ... Deutsche Bank is still out there trying to find a buyer for eBay’s StumbleUpon business, we’ve heard from new sources (we ...

LDS Church Switches to MoveNetworks in Time for Annual Conference
Stay N' Alive —

Weekly Wrapup: Nokia's iPhone Competitor, Netflix API, RDF Apps, and More
ReadWriteWeb — It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week Nokia launched an iPhone competitor called the Tube, Netflix released an API, Google Blog Search re-designed, and we ran a poll about Flash coming to iPhone. On the trends side, we investigated the lack of commercial RDF apps in the Semantic Web, reviewed 5 insightful science books, launched our 'Gritty Entrepreneurs' series, and interviewed a co-founder of last.fm. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel. Sponsor Web Products Nokia Reveals ...

@WillieCrawford Now you have to post one for Biden. Something about gettng facts from comic books...;)
Politweets — ... web @ mark33 Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" or Metallica's "Enter Sandman." 11:18 PM October 05, 2008 from web in reply to mark33 Moofing??? http://tinyurl.com/4ngft2 01:58 PM October 05, 2008 from web @ WillieCrawford You write good stuff. Hope the book does well (I expect its sales will rock with your recommendation.) 01:57 PM October 05, 2008 from web in reply to WillieCrawford Just stumbling around: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ 01:56 PM October 05, 2008 from web @ bigmarketing ...

Reasons Why StumbleUpon Merged With Digg Makes Sense
Profy — Recently TechCrunch has initiated the rumors that eBay may be looking for a potential buyer for StumbleUpon (acquired for $75 million in May 2007) to sell this property for at least the amount it initially paid for it. Of course the blogosphere is actively engaged in various conversation of who could be the right buyer for StumbleUpon during the recession we are facing now. Earlier this week Om Malik has come up with an interesting suggestion for a potential buyer - Digg. In the post Om mentions that his numerous sources ...

Radar Networks delivers Twine 1.0
Outside the Lines — ... In the last six months of beta testing, 500,000 users joined Twine and 50,000 remain active, Spivack said. Half of the Twines created are public and members have added about one million items to the database. "The most interesting statistic is time spent--six minutes per user per session, which is more than a tracking and discovery sites like delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon receives," he claimed. In order to keep the 50,000 active users and grow its base, the key change from the beta in version 1.0 is a simplification of the user experience. "When we ...

Radar Networks delivers Twine 1.0
Webware.com — ... In the last six months of beta testing, 500,000 users joined Twine and 50,000 remain active, Spivack said. Half of the Twines created are public and members have added about one million items to the database. "The most interesting statistic is time spent--six minutes per user per session, which is more than a tracking and discovery sites like delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon receives," he claimed. In order to keep the 50,000 active users and grow its base, the key change from the beta in version 1.0 is a simplification of the user experience. "When we ...

Twine goes fully public with next-generation bookmarking
VentureBeat — Twine, a bookmarking and knowledge-tracking application developed by Radar Networks, is leaving its closed beta tonight with an array of new features, in hopes of becoming one of the definitive websites of the next generation of the Internet. Here’s why it might succeed: It hopes to create a web of connected knowledge encompassing the whole Internet, which will start by replacing your bookmarks bar and finish by assembling a modern-day Dewey Decimal System for the cluttered, often unnavigable mass of information on millions of web pages. (Of course, it might share that ...

Twine reaches 1.0, opens to public
Download Squad — ... I had a chance to talk to Nova Spivack, the CEO and founder of Radar Networks-- the company behind Twine -- last week and he walked me through the service. I have to say, as someone who was intrigued by the idea of Twine before, but frustrated by its interface, the new Twine kicks ass. Twine describes itself as an "interest network," you could also call it a semantic web portal. I like to think of it like Delicious on crack. Like Delicious, and Stumble Upon and to a lesser extent, Digg, Twine is a way to manage and share links of ...

What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC)
ReadWriteWeb — It's all about the web apps these days, right? Everything important's in the clouds? Not so fast! Spend some time separated from your physical computer and you'll likely be reminded just how much time and care you've put into setting it up like you want it. Even in this era of web app hype, we still love a good piece of desktop software, don't we? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself. ...

Is the Original Blogging Dead?
Fast Company - Technology — 9:38 am | 2 recommendations | 6 comments Is the Original Blogging Dead? | posted by Allyson Kapin In the tech world, where tools and gadgets are way cool one day and so 2004 the next, is blogging really dead? According to Paul Boutin, who ironically writes for the Sillicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag , blogging is out and being replaced by the next generation of social networking tools - Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. In a recent WIRED Magazine article , Boutin says that the mainstream media has taken over the blogosphere with professional writers, who break the big stories these days. “Scroll ...

iPhone app review: Cooliris
Obsessable News Feed — ... that lets you visually browse news and images around the web. Think of it a bit like a highly visual StumbleUpon. We took a look at the new iPhone version of the service; follow the continued link for our impressions. ...

Daily Kos: Palin Pranked http://tinyurl.com/638zm4 via @ShareThis; as a friend from Alaska says Hi-larious!
Politweets — ... of value 2:29 AM Oct 27th from web http://tinyurl.com/5w24cm via @ ShareThis ; hated the original version but this one is great! 2:08 AM Oct 26th from web It's so quiet at 4:15 am. 1:15 AM Oct 26th from web Am I taking on the facial expressions/mannerisms of my daughter or she taking on mine? 4:48 PM Oct 25th from web about to get a haircut...again. 11:59 AM Oct 25th from web Came across a great firfox plug-in, StumbleUpon, http://www.stumbleupon.com/ 3:24 AM Oct 25th from web Been up since 3:30 am and feeling ...

Get Inspired by These Social Network Avatars
Webmonkey — How many times have you joined a new social site and not immediately uploaded a picture to represent you? Probably more than you can count. So you know the feeling of making your way around sites while looking like every new user, with a default avatar. If you’re planning on creating a site that lets users upload a photo, check our collection of default avatars to give you inspiration… or maybe tell you what not to do. Who’s that shadowy figure? A popular choice for default avatars is to include the outline of a person ...

StumbleUpon Takes A Lesson From Digg, Starts Banning Users
ReadWriteWeb — ... In addition, the only reason StumbleUpon would terminate accounts according to their TOS is if the account was created with the primary intention to promote a product or service are considered "SPAM." In other words, the occasional accidental spammy stumble shouldn't get you kicked out. ...

Microsoft Revamps Windows Live: Adds Services to Socialize, Unify Web
Today @ PC World — ... Windows Live Essential desktop applications , all already available in beta form. The updated services include Hotmail (which now offers unlimited storage, faster performance and an improved spam filter) and Windows Live SkyDrive (which upped its free online storage limit from 5GB to 25GB of data). [image] The big news, though, is the announcement of relationships with over 50 third-party services ranging from Digg , Flickr , and Pandora to StumbleUpon , Twitter , and Wordpress . Through these partnerships Microsoft is ...

StumbleUpon adds more 'Premier' publishers to Partner Program
Webware.com — StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, announced Tuesday that it has expanded its Partner Program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com. StumbleUpon's Partner Program ...

Firefox Launches Add-On Organizer
Wired: Epicenter — ... While longtime users of Firefox already know about the add-ons they are likely to want, the new packaging makes it even easier for developers to connect to new users. And many companies with add-ons included in Fashion Your Firefox — like StumbleUpon, ...

15 Minutes of Fame: More dings, less killing
WoW.com — ... door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about. The diminutive subject of 15 Minutes of Fame's inaugural profile, back in January of this year, spent a good chunk of change longer than a mere quarter-hour in the limelight. The life and times of Noor the Pacifist, who levels without experience from kills, garnered widespread attention not only here at WoW Insider but in an onslaught of hits from Digg, Stumble Upon, Fark and even the very cool people at Boing Boing. It seemed like ...

Here Comes The New StumbleUpon
Mashable! — Social browsing site StumbleUpon is preparing a new version. Beta users were able to see some of the new features, but now StumbleUpon has temporarily “degraded” them back to the old version of the site in order to prepare for a full rollout of the new version. Important new updates which we’ll see in the new version include an upgraded homepage, improved URL review page, improved tag page, and better web stumbling with Mass Share. The homepage will finally lose the huge, unnecessary header image, at least for logged in users; it will also bring you content based on your ...

Introducing Exchange Rates for Blog Comments and Interactions
louisgray.com — ... that a comment on the original author's blog post should be counted as "1 CN", to establish a baseline. Actions that are worth more than 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include: Making a comment on the original blog, then blogging about that discussion on your own blog. (10 CN) Writing a new blog post on the same topic and linking back to the original author as the source. (5 CN) Submitting the blog post to StumbleUpon with a strong description and good tagging. (3 CN) Submitting the ...

Sharing, Self Promotion Always a Two-Way Street
louisgray.com — By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed) Last month, I touched upon 35 tips for getting started with social media. Today I want to expand a little more on that, and focus on one key area for success, sharing and self promotion. You just wrote a good piece of quality content, you are proud, and you want the world to know. The next step in the process, a topic that frequently comes up, mainly from beginners who are just getting started in social media, is deciding whether or not to self promote/share your own content. Social ...

Get Ready for Black Friday
Technology - Channel Feed — ... for PC and MySims Kingdom for the Wii. Here’s how it’s going to work: Look for the giveaway post that I publish on Friday after 8am CDT. #1 Post a comment on the Black Friday Giveaway post stating which game you want and why - you have to choose one. #2 Write your own post on your blog with a link back to the Black Friday Giveaway post and then make sure to leave me a comment on my post with a link back to yours. #3 Twitter about the giveaway, stumble it and Digg the giveaway - make sure that you leave a comment with the URLS on ...

Will Yahoo Buzz Trip Over StumbleUpon?
Mashable! — Chris Lynn is a social media specialist, working with clients from the Marketing, Online Advertising, Mobile, Consumer Tech, and Social Media industries. He also edits socialTNT, a blog on new media, marketing and PR. Over the last couple of months, Yahoo Buzz has slowly built up its features, seemingly setting its sights on top player Digg. Likewise, StumbleUpon has also upped the ante, adding new features to further court the growing social browsing market. While Yahoo Buzz may not yet be ...

BuzzBox’s Fast Forward Is StumbleUpon With A Train Of Thought
TechCrunch — I like StumbleUpon, the website recommendation engine that lets me click a button whenever I’d like to view a new, potentially interesting website. But for all the hours it has helped me waste, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it useful - pages that get recommended are rarely related to each other beyond a general category, so there’s never any logical train of thought. San Francisco-based startup BuzzBox is looking to add some logic to the art of ’stumbling’ with its new Firefox plugin, Fast ...

Why Social Media May Not be Right For You!
Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim — ... . Stumbleupon is renowned for it’s fabulous ability to drive traffic: many servers have been shut down by traffic surges coming their way from Stumblers alone. ...

Black Friday = Free Games
Technology - Channel Feed — #1 Post a comment on this post stating which game you want and why - you have to choose one. #2 Write your own post on your blog with a link back to this post and then make sure to leave me a comment on my post with a link back to yours. #3 Twitter about the giveaway, stumble it and Digg the giveaway - make sure that you leave a comment with the URLS on this post so that I know that you did it. You get one point for #1.  You get five points for #2 and you get 1 point for each tweet link and for each stumble and Digg. The ...

BuzzBox Fast Forward adds smarter "Stumbling" to Firefox
Download Squad — ... First off, let me clarify: I'm not saying that StumbleUpon isn't a very complex, smartly built addon. It's just that I don't go stumbling off to a (somewhat) randomly selected site all the time. Sometimes I'd like walk a path that has been trodden by others searching for the same things I am. ...

What We Did Last Summer: Social Network Aggregation and Activity Feeds in Windows Live
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life — ... from your desktop. Both the gadget and Atom feed feature were the results of dev work by our 2008 summer interns. As I mentioned on Twitter a few months ago I suspect many of my readers will appreciate their output. We also enable our users to aggregate their online activity in a single place and then share it with their friends. For example, if you go to my Windows Live profile you’ll see that I’ve aggregated my activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon,and my personal weblog onto my Windows Live profile which will then show up ...

Grouptivity Takes on ShareThis and AddThis [WebWorkerDaily]
GigaOM Network — ... been using ShareThis on my blogs and recommending it to my clients for a while now. I explain to my clients that ShareThis is a “passive broadcaster” of their content, giving their blog and web site visitors handy tools to email posts or articles to others, to easily blog about the content they are reading or to link to the content via any of over 30 social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Mixx and del.icio.us. For a while now, ShareThis had only one direct ...

Getting Started With Google Friend Connect
louisgray.com — By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed) Back in May, Google announced their plans to launch Friend Connect. Friend Connect allows website owners to incorporate social aspects and elements onto their sites. It's powered by OpenSocial, which was developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. In a nutshell, OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs used for building and distributing social applications and their data across many websites. This data includes profile information, ...

Social Media & My Somewhat Obsession With Shiny Objects of the Web @ SIPA in Vegas
SOMEWHAT FRANK — ... the need of an account to set it up Remember the Milk - Enables me to create to-do lists that can be pulled into Gmail or accessed on the iPhone with a pro account Shiny Objects for Content Discovery Mixx - Social news site that users contribute content on a long tail variety of topics Digg - Social news site that users contribute and vote on the content of a the perfect news homepage Delicious - Social bookmarking StumbleUpon - Content discovery by stumbling upon new things Shareaholic - A ...

Announcing Blogger’s Choice Open Web Awards Winners!
Mashable! — ... Runner-up: Sprout Blog Plugins Winner: ShareThis Runner-up: AddThis Social News Winner: Digg Runner-up: Mixx Social Networking Applications Winner: Ping.fm Runner-up: Twitterfeed Social Bookmarking Winner: Delicious Runner-up: StumbleUpon Search & Social Search Winner: Google ...

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of StumbleUpon
Mashable! — ... , and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (No Safari or Google Chrome version just yet). The toolbar includes a few different buttons: The Stumble button, which will give you a new webpage with every click. The Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons, which will add or remove sites from your favorites list, as well as tell StumbleUpon to show you more or less sites like the current one. ...

My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close
louisgray.com — ... up some smaller companies. Digg continually sounded like it was shopping itself, but it never sold, and the company's CEO often denied talks were occuring with anyone. Also, given the stock market crash, Facebook is no doubt valued much lower these days, making a stock transaction less likely. 3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation Wrong. So Far. In September, TechCrunch and others reported that eBay planned to sell StumbleUpon, but no sale has taken place yet. At this point, also, with ...

Wii to Get Video on Demand…Sorta [NewTeeVee]
GigaOM Network — ... and StumbleUpon have pioneered Wii versions of their video recommendation services that hint at the future. But dealing with ...

2008: The Year That Was
BIA/Kelsey Blog — ... for 2009. But what’s the final word for 2008? Truly, it was a very stimulating and thoughtful year for our local media and commerce industry. But speaking for myself, it’s hard to say whether it was a good year, especially with fresh layoffs that we are hearing about every day. In fact, the year was kind of Dickensian  (“best of times, worst of times”). On one hand, there has been an explosion in local content with YouTube, Twitter and Stumble Upon; and omnipresent local reviews with services such as Yelp and ...

10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech
louisgray.com — ... terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year. 10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold. Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last ...

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche
ReadWriteWeb — In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field. Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick ...

TKG Data and Analysis: A Weekly Recap
BIA/Kelsey Blog — ... for 2009. But what’s the final word for 2008? Truly, it was a very stimulating and thoughtful year for our local media and commerce industry. But speaking for myself, it’s hard to say whether it was a good year, especially with fresh layoffs that we are hearing about every day. In fact, the year was kind of Dickensian  (“best of times, worst of times”). On one hand, there has been an explosion in local content with YouTube, Twitter and Stumble Upon; and omnipresent local reviews with services such as Yelp and Angie’s ...

How to downsize your social network portfolio
Webware.com — I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts. But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with ...

Top 5 Reasons the "C Word" Should Be Your Priority
WebProNews Feed — ... and StumbleUpon . In fact, you might as well give readers an easy way to share your content by offering social links within it. RSS feeds are typically a good idea too. This is just one more doorway for people to get to your content, and an ongoing one at that, should they stay subscribed to you feeds (they will also keep your brand fresh in readers' minds). Then There's the fact that feed readers often offer their own sharing features leading to even more opportunities for more people to see your work. Social Bookmarking Icons These things are the word-of-mouth of ...

Where Digg Fails, A Success for StumbleUpon
Mashable! — ... 1. Sponsored Users - while a free, basic StumbleUpon account has everything that most users will ever need, the service allows you to upgrade to a sponsored account for a modest fee. ...

Windows Live Tip: How to Add your Flickr Photos to your Windows Live Profile
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life — ... as shown below   7.) After pushing the "Add" button you should end up back on your profile with your Flickr information now visible on it. A.) People in your network can now see your Flickr updates in various Windows Live applications including Windows Live Messenger as shown below   PS: The same basic set of steps work for adding activities from Twitter, Pandora, StumbleUpon, Flixster, PhotoBucket, Yelp, iLike, blogs hosted on ...

Too Lazy to Click that StumbleUpon Button? Playericious May Be for You
ReadWriteWeb — Social bookmarking sites - as many of us know - are a veritable treasure trove of information, especially when it comes to common tags like "howto" or "webdesign." But sometimes, clicking through all of those links can get a bit arduous. That's what makes playericious so great. It's designed to let you be lazy. Just a few keystrokes and you'll soon be perusing the best delicious and ma.gnolia have to offer. Sponsor Playericious is incredibly simple to use: specify a tag for which you'd like to see pages, pick delicious or magnolia as the source, and ...

AD FAIL: StumbleUpon Ads on Digg
Mashable! — StumbleUpon - the social exploration site and Digg rival - is advertising on Digg.com, spotted Flickr user Michael Pinto. It gets better: StumbleUpon isn’t looking for users, but rather promoting StumbleUpon Advertising. StumbleUpon stealing advertisers from Digg using Digg Ads? Amusing, but not necessarily intentional: StumbleUpon could have made an ad buy across a number of sites. Regardless, it’s time to enable the competitive ad filter, Digg! Mashable on Digg Mashable promotes interesting social media ...

Is Requiring a Firefox Plugin Akin to Designing for IE Only?
louisgray.com — ... As an Apple Safari user, I know there are some places where the browser falls short. For whatever reason, it isn't supported by toolbars, including StumbleUpon or the ...

Face It: Facebook Needs A Facelift
louisgray.com — ... , message boards/forums, blogs, StumbleUpon and other areas of the open web, and then days or even weeks later it ends up on Facebook. Facebook is fine at sharing friend-centric content like pictures of your last social gathering with a group, but it's simply not a place for discovering news, interesting blogs, or other valuable content. The content eventually gets into Facebook via links but by the time this happens, it is old news. In fact, just ...

LetMeKnow Launches "Alerts-as-a-Service"
ReadWriteWeb — From branchnext, the same company that delivered the personal web scout service Yotify (our coverage), there comes a new B2B alerts service called LetMeKnow. As with Yotify, LetMeKnow lets you track any number of changes that happen on the web - from price changes to new blog posts or comments and much more. However, unlike Yotify's consumer-facing service, LetMeKnow is designed for use by web publishers instead. Sponsor About LetMeKnow The white-label service LetMeKnow allows any web publisher to easily integrate the ...

Veoh: The Opposite of a Video Portal? [NewTeeVee]
GigaOM Network — ... a plug-in that surfaces relevant videos as users navigate other web sites. What’s interesting is how radically different offering this tool is from Veoh’s original task of being a video portal — the Compass operates completely off of Veoh’s web site, and it brings in videos hosted by competitor sites, not just Veoh. The Compass is kind of a combo of recent video plug-ins from Cooliris, RealPlayer, StumbleUpon, and VodPod, though I totally understand and respect if you’ve never heard of ...

Some Think Google Should Go After eBay
WebProNews Feed — ... . That was when eBay was trading far higher than today. Based on current valuation eBay is even more of a compelling value play. (Its price is nearing book value.) StumbleUpon The article goes into a lot of detail and talks specifically about the benefits of owning properties like Skype and PayPal. One thing it does not mention is eBay's ownership of StumbleUpon, a service that ...

StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter
ReadWriteWeb — What's got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network, like Pandora for webpages and videos, just passed 7 million users according to the site. That's about 50% bigger than Twitter, though Stumble is rarely talked about and never promoted. Every media personality on the planet is gaga over Twitter. Today is a good time to remember what a big deal StumbleUpon is, even if it's hardly ever talked about. Sponsor StumbleUpon is a Paradigm Shaker If you ...

Link Building 101, Part 2
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... you or your public relations agency writes press releases, make sure to submit them online. Several companies still send them out via fax. You're missing a great opportunity for some good relevant links. Try to find sites like PR Newswire that let you submit your article with links back to your site. Once your release goes out, it will be picked up by other feeds and land on other news sites -- netting you more links. Social Posting Social media sites like Digg , StumbleUpon and Technorati are great bookmarking sites to help others with similar ...

Spotting spikes in traffic with Google Analytics Motion Charts
D' Technology Weblog — Spikes often deserve special attention when analyzing your site. They can indicate interesting developments in your industry, marketing impact or press coverage. Here’re couple of examples of situations that might cause a spike: The number of visits from a certain referrer, such as stumbleupon.com, suddenly jumps when a blog post gets attention Your conversion rate falls to zero because of an error in your signup form Your percentage of new visitors suddenly increases from an event ...

Social Media Marketing (SMO) 101, Part 1
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... videos or photos with others. Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person's contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It's bringing the world together like nothing else has. Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious , Faves , StumbleUpon , BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and ...

ShareThis.com Aims to Become A Big Data Platform in the Next Web
ReadWriteWeb — Have you noticed those little links next to blog posts and news stories that say "sharethis"? Click on that link and you get a pop-up with options to share an article on Delicious, Facebook, StumbleUpon or other services. Did you know that ShareThis.com has raised $21 million from venture capitalists for its version of that service? If you think that's crazy - you're wrong. ShareThis is a great example of the kind of company that could become a key foundation for innovation in the next era of the web. If it doesn't sell out wholly to advertisers too quickly. The company released a new ...

Developing Successful Viral Marketing Ideas
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... and StumbleUpon , to discover what the big success stories were for industries related to yours. Then put a spin on it to tailor it to your industry. Sell women's clothing? Look at jewelry or cosmetics. Sell merchant account services? Find out what the business loan sites are doing. Represent a hotel or resort? Uncover tour operator strategies. Or examine what hotels are doing in different geographic areas. Fun with Customers For the daring and progressive companies, create a cartoon or video poking fun at customers. Everyone loves a good laugh and it's one of the most ...

Who Are These SXSW Web Awards Finalists? A Guide to the Contenders
ReadWriteWeb — Next month Austin, Texas will fill to the brim with geeks from all around the world gathered to attend the South by Southwest Interactive festival. While smaller than the Music part of SXSW, Interactive is very big and very fun. One part of the event that always goes over our heads, though, is the annual Web Awards. Everyone gathers into a big room and hears a well-known host announce the winners of this Adobe sponsored design contest. Almost no one has any idea who any of these companies are! It's pretty strange, so this year ReadWriteWeb decided to dedicate a good ...

Social Media Marketing 101, Part 2
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... or StumbleUpon . To get an idea of who's talking about you, do a blog search on Technorati or search your domain name in the major search engines with "link:http://www.yoursite.com" (substituting "yoursite.com" with your actual URL, of course). Because most SMM campaigns are designed to drive traffic to your Web site, you should get a traffic source report from your Web analytics tool. For more information, see my columns on ...

Growth Matters: StumbleUpon filters the web
BloggingStocks — ... With all the content on the Web, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could sort through it all and let you know which ones are worth viewing? That's the idea behind StumbleUpon, which its General Manager, Michael Buhr, described to me as follows, "StumbleUpon -- which ...

88 Outstanding Favicons and 6 Resources to Help You Create Your Own
SitePoint — ... Ben and Jerry Finer Design Nymbler StumbleUpon Blooms Today ...

Digg to get a software-free toolbar
Webware.com — Taking a page from StumbleUpon and the now-defunct MySpace News, Digg appears set to roll out a new feature in beta that will bring some of the Digg.com experience along once users leave the social news site to one of its outbound links. A Flickr photo shows the new ...

HOW TO: Explore Mashable Articles with StumbleUpon
Mashable! — ... , as you may know, is a way to discover interesting web content based on your interests. Realizing that our readers would love to see a custom version of Mashable tailored to you, we’ve chosen to become a StumbleUpon Premier Partner, and we’d love your feedback on the new feature: To Start Stumbling Mashable, click here! ...

Digg could take on StumbleUpon, TinyURL with new toolbar
Download Squad — ... is working on a StumbleUpon-like toolbar that lets users digg, bury, or find related stories while surfing the web. Veronica Belmont first ...

X Marks The Spot, Foxmarks To Become Xmarks
TechCrunch — ... and StumbleUpon. While Delicious’s search feature is similar, Xmarks’ search result snapshot is more comprehensive and informative with summaries, reviews and similar sites included in the result. And the ability to see this comprehensive Xmarks snapshot in a Google search or in the address bar is unique. ...

Foxmarks becomes Xmarks, does site discovery
Webware.com — ... Xmarks is used by about 1.5 million people, CEO James Joaquin told me, and it knows about 600 million bookmarks. That's a lot of data to mine, and I asked Joaquin if he thought about offering a StumbleUpon-like feature to help users find completely new sites. He said Xmarks' model is utility, not entertainment. His directed "more like this" discovery is closer to the original Foxmarks mission, he implied, than the random walk down the Web that makes up StumbleUpon. ...

Foxmarks grows up, now is Xmarks
jkOnTheRun — ... and adding additional capabilities to the old Foxmarks.  Sure, it will still synchronize your bookmarks and passwords but they are now adding the ability to suggest sites based on your own user data.  Think of it like StumbleUpon in a way.  You visit a web site, click the Xmarks icon and you’ll get a list of five suggested sites similar to the one you are browsing.  You’ll also get additional site information on your Google search results too. ...

ReadBurner’s BurnURL Fires Up Social Web Sharing [WebWorkerDaily]
GigaOM Network — It’s easy to understand why URL-shortening tools such as TinyURL and bit.ly are popular on the social web. For web workers, the ability to quickly absorb, organize, package, and redistribute information is a critical and demanding task. BurnURL, a new service produced by ...

USocial CEO: 'We're gaming Digg'
L.A. Times Tech Blog — ... Among Digg's and StumbleUpon's tens of millions of users, the social bookmarking sites have successfully dealt with numerous troublemakers who try to "game" the voting systems. But one company may be putting the entire organic voting approach in jeopardy. USocial lets advertisers buy votes on popular social bookmarking sites to catapult their links to sections of Digg, StumbleUpon or AOL's Propeller services that get the most visibility. In Digg's case, a submission that receives enough votes from its users (or with a little ...

Mashable Acquires Micro-Reviews Service Blippr
Mashable! — We’re pleased to announce today Mashable’s acquisition of blippr, a micro-reviews service that lets you review and receive recommendations on web applications, books, games, movies and music in 160 characters or less. Our first integration of blippr’s service is already live on Mashable, allowing you to submit a micro-review whenever we mention the name of a social media site. So words like Twitter, FriendFeed and MySpace now appear with a “face” icon next to them indicating the community’s rating of that site when you hover over it, and ...

StumbleUpon To Launch su.pr ShortUrl Service
TechCrunch — StumbleUpon is preparing to launch a shortURL service (a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs, like TinyURL or Bit.ly) in the next couple of weeks called su.pr. Founder Garret Camp announced the new service on Twitter without any description of what it might be on March 3. In an email exchange he says it will be a shortURL service to share StumbleUpon links on sites like Twitter and Facebook and that it will be launched in a week or two. The site currently redirects to StumbleUpon. ...

Webware Radar: Diddit brings life experiences to Twitter, Facebook
Webware.com — Diddit, a site that allows users to share life experiences with others, announced Friday that its "diddits" and "wanna dos" can now be shared with other social networks. Users will be able to deploy new Diddit widgets, showing their lists of what they've done ("diddits") and like to do ("wanna ...

ReadWriteWeb's Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists
ReadWriteWeb — SXSW Interactive begins today, bringing thousands of geeks from all around the world to Austin, Texas to talk shop and party. One of the key stories about SXSW history is that the Twitter blew up there (in a good way) two years ago. Everybody wants to know - will there be another app that takes off in the same way this year? Many people will likely come to the SXSW Web Awards at the Hilton on Sunday night hoping to discover the next big thing. The fact is, though, that the annual Web Awards are all about design - not social functionality ala Twitter. In years past, most of us have ended up ...

How Do I Import Google Reader, Delicious, and Other Services Into Facebook?
Stay N' Alive —

Being Harry Potter, While You Walk to Work
ReadWriteWeb — Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity's oldest activities - the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO's design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week's SXSW Web Awards. The company's project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin. Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work. ...

The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter
ReadWriteWeb — Hotshots, rock stars, geek heroes - many of us follow a lot of the same people online. But who do they pay the most attention to themselves? The influencers of influencers are of interest for a lot of different reasons, most appropriately because finding them is a good way to dive deeper into niche topics. Twitter exposes conversations that can show us who's in anyone's inner circle because conversations are public and programatically accessible. In the following post we look at the data and find out who has the most reciprocal conversations on Twitter with 10 geek heroes - from the ...

A firehose of free at Google Analytics
Open Source — ... If I were really sophisticated, like the folks in our ad department, I could do something really useful with this knowledge. (Maybe I should go to Stumbleupon more often.) ...

Social Media for Parents - Please DON'T publish
ParentDish — Let's Be Friends Are you keeping up to date with friends and family using social news or networking sites? So are we! ParentDish is about more than our daily posting schedule, so don't hesitate to connect with us on Facebook, Bebo and Twitter. Spread the Word ParentDish is your online home for the best advice, news, opinions and reviews for moms and dads who want to be informed, educated parents. Tens of thousands of people read our blog on a daily basis, and we'd love for our community to continue growing into the most active, engaging ...

New FeedFlare Displays FriendFeed Likes and Comment Counts
louisgray.com — Bloggers who are tied into social media sites have long used FeedBurner's FeedFlare functionality to help promote their blog posts, from pushing visitors to Digg or Stumble posts, add them to Delicious, or e-mail them to friends. But increasingly, information from external social networks is being fed back to the blog itself - from the number of retweets a post may have received to the number of Google Reader users who shared the item, for example. A new custom feedflare, designed by Kevin Fox, the lead designer of FriendFeed, ...

Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post
Mashable! — One of the best things about the web and social media is how much great information is written and produced every single day. If you’re a regular reader of blogs, you probably come across great articles that you just want everyone to know about. But what’s the best way to share these posts? Luckily, there’s no shortage of ways to spread the word. Blogs, social networks, instant messenger, and mobile phones are some of the many ways to let others know about the best content on the web. Here are our 20 favorite ways to share a great blog post: ...

Want Success on Digg? Think Choc Chip Cookies
ReadWriteWeb — Some of us know what hitting the front page of Digg can do: send 20,000 - 200,000+ clicks through to a site. Some of us have even felt the curse (or blessing depending on how you look at it) of the Digg Effect. But how much do you know about integrating social media, specifically Digg, into your site, and what the benefits of doing so can bring to publishers? Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today and explained that if you want successful social media integration, you need to think chocolate chip cookies. "Much like ...

Shocking News: Scientists Say Workplace Social Networking Increases Productivity!
ReadWriteWeb — Can you believe that using social networking sites at work can increase your workplace productivity? A new study just published by Australian scientists found that taking time to visit websites of personal interest, including news sites and YouTube, provided workers a mental break that ultimately increased their ability to concentrate and was correlated with a 9% increase in total productivity. Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to ...

Digg launches a pervasive, software-free toolbar
Webware.com — ... Where Digg may get some heat for the DiggBar is the inclusion of a "random" button which takes users to a random story on Digg. StumbleUpon, which pioneered this concept has had the same thing for years, and more recently as part of ...

Digg Launches New Toolbar - Makes Digging and Sharing Easier
ReadWriteWeb — Digg, the popular social news site, just launched its long awaited DiggBar, a new toolbar that will appear on any page Digg links to. From within the toolbar, users can digg stories and share them with their friends on Twitter and Facebook. Digg will now also feature shortened URLs, and, maybe even more interestingly, Digg now also displays how many times a story has been viewed from Digg. Sponsor In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see ...

Digg Grows Up with DiggBar Tool and Search Engine
Fast Company - Technology — ... It looks like Digg is trying to gently evolve its user experience into something a bit more streamlined with these two new features. But the DiggBar also adds some new functionality for users--you can now see how many times a story has been viewed, and there's also a "random" button that mimics StumbleUpon by taking you to a random Digg submission. There is also a "source" button that shows other stories Dugg from the same author or web site, and a "related" feature that will take you to similar stories. All of these are handy ways to breeze through ...

7 sites that use software-free toolbars (and why it matters)
Webware.com — The launch of the DiggBar on Thursday was big news. Not only for URL shortening services, but for the idea of one site bringing some of its features along for the ride, even when a user has left it to go somewhere else. The idea is not new though, some services have been doing it for years. We've put together a list of some of the big sites that do it, and why it matters. Google/Ask/Yahoo/Live Image Search ...

BurnURL Unveils ShareBar 2 With Moods, E-mail and Social Sharing
louisgray.com — ... Every BurnURL ShareBar shows a "share" button letting visitors of the page further distribute the content, to social sites including StumbleUpon, ...

9 Tools that let you randomly browse the Web
Webware.com — ... . Calling StumbleUpon just a random site generator may not be fair. While it does a great job at taking you to random sites, most of its links have been vetted by a large userbase who go through and weed out some of the bad, or outdated stuff. It's also got a built-in recommendation engine that will tune its "stumbles" to your tastes as you give sites a thumbs up or a thumbs down. ...

Review: The Good Blogs Explorer for iPhone
iPhone Central — ... with which it is paired. The graphics seem to be there simply to break up the text, which is fine. If you see a headline you like, tap it and a summary will pop up. If you want to read the rest of the post, tap the Browse button at the bottom right of the screen, and Good Blogs will launch your device’s Web browser. What isn’t so good about Good Blogs? The topics, while diverse, are not ideal. There should be more. How many more, I wouldn’t presume to say. But as with sites such as StumbleUpon or ...

Review: The Good Blogs Explorer for iPhone
Macworld — ... with which it is paired. The graphics seem to be there simply to break up the text, which is fine. If you see a headline you like, tap it and a summary will pop up. If you want to read the rest of the post, tap the Browse button at the bottom right of the screen, and Good Blogs will launch your device’s Web browser. What isn’t so good about Good Blogs? The topics, while diverse, are not ideal. There should be more. How many more, I wouldn’t presume to say. But as with sites such as StumbleUpon or ...

Digggate: Conspiracy Theory or Brave New World for Digg
ReadWriteWeb — ... John Quinn why they decided to use the 200 instead of a 310, Quinn explained that the answer is simple: Digg's shortener doesn't redirect. Although Digg had investigated all options (including the 301) to ensure the search engines focus on the original content, it decided against using the 301 as it is typically used by services that will redirect you to another page e.g. TinyURL or bit.ly. "Services that provide a frame, like Digg, Facebook or StumbleUpon don't redirect and hence return the 200 code for a successful response," Quinn ...

StumbleUpon Brings Serendipity Back to The Web
VentureBlog — ... That sort of accidental discovery was driven out of the Web a long time ago. The only sorts of chance Internet encounters most of us have these days are a result of mistyped URLs -- not exactly a recipe for exciting new discoveries. Thankfully, one company has made it their mission to bring back discovery to the Web. StumbleUpon delivers nearly half a billion recommendations per month. Those recommendations can be across broad categories (e.g., photography, video, etc.) or in very focused niches (e.g., electric violins, VC blogs, Alice in Wonderland, etc.). The StumbleUpon ...

Breaking: Ebay Unacquires StumbleUpon
TechCrunch — ... discovers Web sites based on your interests, learns what you like, and brings you more.  With more than 7.4 million users and 425 million recommendations per month, StumbleUpon is the leading way to discover great content on the Internet.  More than 20,000 advertisers are using StumbleUpon to promote products and services.  Founded in 2001, StumbleUpon is based in San Francisco and backed by the same investors as Google and Facebook.  For more information, visit www.StumbleUpon.com. ...

StumbleUpon leaves eBay, starting up again on own two feet
VentureBeat — ... Social news discovery site StumbleUpon can be a great way to find interesting stories, which why some of us wondered why auction site eBay bought it for $75 million in late 2007. ...

StumbleUpon Spins Off Independently From eBay
Pulse2 - Technology News And Reviews — About two years ago, eBay bought out StumbleUpon for $75 million. But today StumbleUpon announced that they are spinning off as an independent company again. The company is now backed by Geoff Smith and several other investors. Last month StumbleUpon hit 7 million users. StumbleUpon believes that this will help the company stay more focused on their goal — “helping people discover interesting web content. Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there,” stated StumbleUpon ...

StumbleUpon Breaks Free from eBay - Founds Buy it Back
ReadWriteWeb — Want a geeky way to chill out after a long work day of focus, focus, focus? There are few better ways online to keep the synapses lubricated than through the semi-serendipity of social sharing service StumbleUpon. Now you can Stumble outside of the shadow of the mega-corporate overlords at eBay - two years after Stumble founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith cashed out and handed their baby over to the ecommerce giant, they've come back with a team of investors and bought StumbleUpon back from eBay. It's pretty exciting. Sponsor News of the buyback comes ...

eBay sells StumbleUpon back to... StumbleUpon
Download Squad — Filed under: Social Software, WebA few years ago eBay went on a buying spree and started snatching up companies ranging from Skype to StumbleUpon. While it made plenty of sense for eBay to acquire PayPal, a company that many eBay users were already using to facilitate financial transactions, Skype and StumbleUpon seemed like odd fits. Sure, you could try to figure out a way to use a social web site discovery tool to promote auctions, and you could use Skype's communication tools to encourage communication between buyers and sellers. But both Skype ...

StumbleUpon Lurches Back to Original Owners
Bits — StumbleUpon , a Web tool that makes search suggestions to its users, has just unearthed its latest discovery: On Monday, the company was purchased from eBay by its original owners. “We’re really more focused on discovery and content, said Garrett Camp, one of the original founders, in a phone interview. “We realized it was best if we parted ways and did our own thing.” The company, which eBay acquired in May 2007 to the tune of $75 million , is now backed by the original founders, Mr. Camp and co-founder Geoff Smith, as well as several well-known investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, ...

Great eBay Fire Sale Means StumbleUpon Free Again [GigaOM]
GigaOM Network — Jared Knof (Adroll), Catalina Girald (Moxsie) and Garret Camp (StumbleUpon). Photo by Om Malik StumbleUpon, a content discovery service that was acquired by eBay for a rumored $75 million (or more) is free ...

eBay offloads StumbleUpon
Web User | News — ... An eBay spokesman said that StumbleUpon didn't fit with eBay's portfolio. Focus has now turned to eBay's other acquisitions, specifically telephony website Skype. eBay bought Skype, the online telephone service, for $2.5bn in 2005 and speculation is mounting that a sale is also imminent, though eBay denied this. StumbleUpon was founded in 2001 and in the past three years has undergone rapid growth, up from one million members in 2006 to more than seven million this year. Members can rate and recommend all manner of internet material from videos, images and articles on ...

StumbleUpon, A Case Study In The Efficient Allocation Of Resources
TechCrunch — ... So StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that lets users browse and discover new websites by clicking a button, was a subsidiary of eBay for just less than two years. The ...

StumbleUpon finds its way out of eBay
GMSV — ... Americans are rummaging through closets, attics and garages looking for stuff they can afford to part with items they were once excited about, maybe even paid a lot of money for, but which for one reason or another ended up barely used. Auction giant eBay, interested both in picking up some extra cash and simplifying its life, is going through a similar process, and Monday it found a buyer for one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” purchases, the 2007 acquisition of StumbleUpon , a social Web site recommendation service. The new owners won’t need much of an ...

eBay's spring cleaning
BloggingStocks — Filed under: eBay (EBAY) As for M&A, eBay's (NASDAQ: EBAY) strategy has been mostly helter-skelter. In some cases, the deals were brilliant, such as for PayPal. But in other cases, the transactions have been wacky. Well, it looks like eBay is cleaning up the M&A mess. And the first action-item: getting rid of StumbleUpon. In the overall scheme of things, the transaction wasn't very material -- coming to $75 million (two years ago). But the site - which allows for the recommendation of sites -- did have lots of ...

StumbleUpon Founders Buy Service Back From eBay
AppScout — Two years after selling their popular Website discovery service to eBay, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith have bought StumbleUpon back. eBay, which had picked up the service back in 2007 for $75 million, had reportedly been looking for a buyer for StumbleUpon late last year. StumbleUpon's founders were able to re-purchase the service with help from a number of investors including Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. Co-founder Camp will be stepping into the role of CEO for the company. "We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term ...

eBay To Spin Off Skype With IPO In 2010
TechWeb — ... . For eBay, the move is the latest step to help it refocus on its roots as an online retailer. The company purchased the Web-discovery service StumbleUpon for about $75 million in 2007, but sold it back to its founders Monday for an undisclosed amount. The company will likely focus future acquisitions on targets with direct synergies like the ...

eBay To Spin Off Skype With IPO In 2010
InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs — ... . For eBay, the move is the latest step to help it refocus on its roots as an online retailer. The company purchased the Web-discovery service StumbleUpon for about $75 million in 2007, but sold it back to its founders Monday for an undisclosed amount. The company will likely focus future acquisitions on targets with direct synergies like the ...

Led by controversial DiggBar, toolbars are taking over the Web
L.A. Times Tech Blog — Digg's new toolbar, which follows users around the Web by placing a frame on top of external websites, has had a bumpy first week after some bloggers publicly condemned the new product.  Some bloggers have been relentless in their protests against the social news site for ...

eBay: Prepare For More De-Megification
BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily — Whoa, what’s gotten into eBay (EBAY)? Over the last few weeks, the company has announced plans to spin-off Skype, struck a deal to buy Gmarket (GMKT) and unloaded StumbleUpon back to its original owners. The larger strategy, according to Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, is to get back to their core marketplace strategy. In particular, he said in an interview with Tech Trader Daily, the company has revived a geographic ...

Weekly Wrapup: Social Media Monitoring, Future of Firefox, eBay Sells StumbleUpon, And More...
ReadWriteWeb — In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the latest in social media monitoring tools, investigate how cloud computing is being used in scientific research projects, review some future Firefox concepts, check out the latest iPhone app usage stats, report on eBay selling off StumbleUpon and preparing for a Skype IPO, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media. Sponsor Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup You can subscribe ...

The Destination Is In The Conversation
louisgray.com — ... is find them. That process is simplified by the following theory: find one, find them all! If I find one person I know on Facebook or MySpace, I'm bound to find a few more mutual friends too. Whatever, So Where's The Real Destination? So what will happen to the big destinations later on down the line? I'm betting that they'll adapt to the landscape and integrate what needs to be integrated. Facebook is already doing this with Digg and StumbleUpon integration. They aren't alone. I'd bet you $100 that just ...

Coming Next Week: New Web Activities And Contact Importing From MySpace, Hi5 And Tagged
LiveSide - Windows Live news and interviews — ... Facebook, Digg, Last.fm, SmugMug, and Fotolog to your profile. Every time you do something on those sites it will turn up on your profile, and of course in your friend’s “What’s New” feed. These new additions bring the grand total of third-party content partners to more than 30! Feed Partners: Daum, flickr, Flixter, iLike, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, WordPress, Yelp New ...

Gadgetwise: How to Manage Your Reputation Online
NYT > Technology — On Tuesday, Google announced that it has started displaying Google profile results on name queries to help give users more control over their Google identity. As anyone who has been Googled knows, unflattering results of your name or company–especially when listed in the first several pages–can run the gamut from embarrassing to damaging. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to remove content from Google. The search engine’s rule of thumb is to send you to the Web master of the site who often owns the content in question and has final veto power over its removal. As for Google profile, it runs at ...

5 Tips for Better Time Management of Your Social Media Marketing
Fast Company - Technology — ... or StumbeUpon. Later that day read through the links you've bookmarked and only read the best, more relevant three. Update all your statuses (statii?) using Ping.fm. ...

StumbleUpon adds web-based chops to its recommendations
VentureBeat — ... StumbleUpon, a web application for discovering and rating web content, is finally branching outside its toolbar. The site has announced a new browser-based set of features that will allow users to access the service from any computer. ...

Repost: The Social Web and Windows Live
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life — ... participating in from all over the Web with their friends who use Windows Live services like Hotmail and Messenger. Customers of Windows Live can now add activities from over thirty different online services to their Windows Live profile including social networking sites like Facebook, photo sharing sites like Smugmug & Photobucket, social music sites like last.fm & Pandora, social bookmarking sites like Digg & Stumbleupon and much more. We are also happy to announce today that in the coming ...

Google channels Digg, Reddit with “What’s Popular”
VentureBeat — ... When you look at What’s Popular on its own, it’s questionable how useful it will be for most readers. Yes, the algorithms at play are unique, and could lead users to new, interesting content — much like similar service StumbleUpon. And it does make it easier for even casual users to submit their own links on a whim. But it lacks a commenting interface, and the sense of community that has made sites like Digg and Reddit so popular. People don’t just want to define their preferences, they ...

Gadgetwise: 10 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site
NYT > Technology — ... tab at the bottom of each post. You might also try creating a weekly newsletter that highlights your best content. Blast it out to readers who sign up. Comment on online forums and blog posts and link to your Web site each time. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation. Do not spam. Also add your blog or Web site to your e-mail signature, Twitter , Facebook and other online accounts. Claim your blog on Technorati and look into submitting content on StumbleUpon and Delicious . Also, create a “lens” or page on Squidoo . DON’T ...

How To Create A Twitter Following
bMighty.com - Features — ... That said, when you get to more than 50 followers, it's impossible to read what all your followers tweet. Then you have to focus on direct private and public messages. Always Link To Interesting Stories And Pictures . Think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon . The Twitter pickup artist's mantra is "Always be linking." Establish Yourself As A Subject Expert . That way, you'll be interesting to some subset of people. Say you're an expert on Macintosh. Search for "Macintosh" and answer people's questions. People are likely to not only follow you, but also retweet your ...

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
Wired Top Stories — ... but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. ...

Visual search engine Ziipa lets you stumble with your eyes
VentureBeat — ... is a rare combination of semantic search, crowdsourcing, and the random site discovery features that have made sites like StumbleUpon so popular. By using the site, you are almost guaranteed to find a site you like that you’ve never seen before. Alternatively, if you start out with a very specific query, you’re unlikely to find exactly what you’re looking for. ...

Feel The DailyBurn: Gyminee Gets A New Name, Raises $525K
TechCrunch — ... of 2008, has closed a $525,000 seed funding round led by FF Angel LLC, with a number of angels including Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon) and Tim Ferriss also participating. Alongside the funding news, Gyminee is also announcing a total rebranding - the company will henceforth be called ...

StumbleUpon Launches Su.pr URL Shortener, But Is It Good for the Magic?
ReadWriteWeb — Social serendipity service StumbleUpon began opening up its new URL shortening service this morning and we have 250 invites included below. StumbleUpon is great for two things: discovering fabulous new websites and getting waves of traffic sent to sites you publish. The new URL service is indeed quite Su.pr (that's its name) but we wonder if it will lead to such an influx of publisher-submitted content that content submitted by users because it's cool will have more noise to compete with. For publishers the service looks very cool, it includes features we haven't seen anywhere else and ...

Su.pr Links Come to StumbleUpon
(Obsolete Feed) — When I see a large spike in traffic on several of my blogs, I don’t even have to check the logs to know that there’s a good chance it’s folks coming via StumbleUpon (SU). SU discovers Web sites based on your interests and keeps track of the pages you like in order to deliver similar content. While the ’stickiness’ of the traffic sent by SU is definitely questionable, most Web site owners are happy for the extra traffic. What good would a recommendation engine be in mid-2009 with being Twitter-friendly? A step in the right direction for SU is Su.pr, a ...

Su.pr URL Shortening Service From StumbleUpon
Official Windows Magazine | Home — ... from StumbleUpon.com . All of us are aware of StumbleUpon.com a popular website for discovering & Rating webpages on internet. Su.pr allows users to share a link, with a shortened URL , through Twitter but also Facebook and obviously StumbleUpon. Su.pr not like rest of URl shortening service but it aims to be more like a ‘link tracking’ service where you can track of how much the link is being shared and spread via Dashboard provided by Su.pr. Su.pr is currently in private beta mode and you need to have invitation code to create account. Similar Posts: [image] Note: This ...

Top Signs Your Site Isn't Ready for Prime Time
SearchEngineWatch Experts — Many things have changed in the last few years, but the real foundation for SEO success hasn't changed much at all. Yeah, sure, some important things work today that weren't even available years ago -- namely blog content and promotion , and social media promotion through Digg , StumbleUpon , Reddit , Propeller , Twitter , or what have you. Yeah, we should always find ways to add fresh content to our Web site, optimize all digital assets that we have (images, video, etc.), but the real SEO basics are still often ...

Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's blog — Like it or lump it, the major reason that determines whether any given online story will get read or not is how much play it gets on news link sharing sites and social networks like Digg , reddit , and StumbleUpon . Unlike earlier news sharing sites like Slashdot , these sites have no central editorial control. Instead, the stories that get prominent play on these sites is determined entirely by readers. That sounds like democracy in its most basic form, but in practice what it really means that stories can be buried from sight by abusive users with an ax ...

AOL Revamps Truveo Video Search Engine
Contentinople: — ... , and StumbleUpon . Since acquiring Truveo shortly after its debut in late 2005, AOL has struggled to generate significant traffic with the video search engine, which is currently ranked as the 296th most popular Website worldwide by ...

StumbleUpon Can Get You Big Traffic and Lots of Links
WebProNews Feed — ... content, and it wasn't all that great for links and targeted traffic, although it was always easy to see the potential of the technology. Now since StumbleUpon has become more web-based this year with features like a web-based toolbar, a navigational section with popular & related content, StumlbeUpon buttons for webmasters to add to their sites, etc., the company has been driving people to participate and interact with other users more.   According to Csutoras, StumlbeUpon went from 5 million users last ...

What’s next: A StumbleUpon for porn?
VentureBeat — ... may also be co-opting adult traffic, suggesting people are focusing on the real McCoy). Aggregators like Xvideos, RedTube, and YouPorn have made finding porn easier, but these sites do a poor job of personalization. In a category where people have such deep and varied tastes, there is an opportunity to create a StumbleUpon for porn. Let’s call this hypothetical product Frisky. Frisky could be a toolbar like personalized recommendation service StumbleUpon but would likely get traction faster as a website like Digg. Users would sign ...

8 Things I Learned About You
Quick Sprout — ... You probably use StumbleUpon, and if you do, you tend to stumble the new blog posts I write during the weekdays. The interesting thing is, although you read older blog posts, you rarely stumble those. ...

Sharing Content Using RSS can improve Your Marketing
Inc.com — I’ve been writing about having a small business website, in 8 Options to Quickly Build a Web Presence for your Startup, about using a blog to promote your business in Building Success By Blogging: An Architect's Story and even about Smart Blogging Strategies. Today we’re going to explore the magic of a technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS lets you publish content on your site, and have other people easily view it on many other sites. For example, you could add this column to a program called a “feed reader” and then every time it is published, you would see it ...

Open data is the future of web discovery
VentureBeat — ... and many others but so far their toolbar distribution and/or data access ended up as or is a fraction of the major web players. OneRiot uses a toolbar to get data to influence search results.  OneRiot gets data from several thousand toolbar user each day, and the total number of URLs visited each day is five times as many tweets are sent on all of Twitter each day. OneRiot plans to make data including anonymous user activity collected from the toolbar available to developers. StumbleUpon offers an optional toolbar to help discover content around the web that recently passed 10 ...

Tumblr launches TumblUpon toolbar
The Next Web — ... which does a pretty good job of ranking and categorizing their users. This is yet another way to discover great content on their service – although it will be much more valuable for Tumblr users who can be served up more targeted content by using their “like” history. It will certainly be another time sink that I will try to keep away from. I try to avoid StumbleUpon and it’s toolbar at all costs but it can sometimes be hard to avoid. ...

Roundup: Bartz is tougher than you, new Zunes are pretty
VentureBeat — Cisco forecasts lower revenue for Q1, stock drops 74 points - - Barron’s reports that on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts, Cisco management “forecast fiscal Q1 revenue to decline by 15% to 17%.” It’s not bad compared to the street’s estimates, but traders punished the company with a 3.4% drop in after-hours trading. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wants you to know she’s tougher than you’ll ever, ever be — At Autodesk, she worked while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. She ...

The Technology Liberation Front Turns 5 Today!
Technology Liberation Front —

ShareIn.com: Like Bit.ly for Sharing on Twitter, Facebook, With Popular Items
louisgray.com — You can hardly walk through a few pages on the Web these days without bumping into some variety of URL shortener, sharing bookmarklet, or aggregation site that tries to show the most popular data. Bit.ly has become the shortener of choice for Twitter, with StumbleUpon and Digg having their own offerings in sharebar land. A lesser-known alternative is ShareIn.com, which launched a while back, and hasn't had a whole lot of pickup, so far as I can tell. But in looking at the service, I see that ShareIn.com combines the information I've ...

Sharein.com: Share to Twitter, Facebook, E-mail With Popular Items
louisgray.com —

5 Steps to Getting Unstuck and Pursuing Your Goals
Mashable! — ... Start keeping a record of what you’ve learned from the search and discovery process, and save yourself time from having to start over in future searches. Services that are oldies but goodies like Digg, Delicious, or StumbleUpon can help you stay organized, while newer options like Yahoo! Searchpad can help you start to integrate tagged content from your research around your goals. Combine the results from your search and discovery with available suites of GTD tools to start ...

Facebook Fund REV Graduation Day: Backlight, Thread and More
ReadWriteWeb — ... : Backlight is a community that allows members to share inspirational digital assets from across the web. The community puts art into context by illuminating upon it with a background narrative. Backlight offers a StumbleUpon-style bookmarklet, Facebook Connect integration through page updates and notes, and the group plans on developing a point-based credit system entitled "social currency." ...

Why shouldn’t I put my iPhone in a case?
Just Another iPhone Blog — Copyright © 2009 Thomas. Visit the original article at http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/iphone-accessories/why-shouldnt-i-put-my-iphone-in-a-case/ . I just stumbled upon (but not through StumbleUpon ) an article from the Cult of Mac about how writer Tim Cox doesn’t want to keep his iPhone in a case. He basically states that none of us should be using cases because they take away from the iPhone experience as Jobs intended. I’m not against the “naked” iPhone, but I can’t help but think that ...

SwingVine Keeps A Pulse On What’s Trending On The Web
TechCrunch — There are many sites that try to help consumers keep a pulse on the buzz of what’s happening on the web. StumbleUpon, iLike, and others all try to help users search for and find specific, personalized content on the web that may be appealing to them. SwingVine is trying to serve this purpose by aggregating data and news from across the web, analyzing the volume of online buzz, the reputation of various sources, user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on ...

Comment of the week… selected with help from Socrates
Nokia Conversations - Posts — ... That piece and this week’s winning comment do something that is often sidelined in favour of many of us lingering on our irrepressible appetite for what’s next (guilty as charged) – both refreshingly stop to enjoy the now, in this case web browsing on Nokia touch devices such as the N97. So it’s funny that earlier today on my morning Stumbleupon stroll that I read a quote on ...

When to Run Away from an SEO Company
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... or StumbleUpon . These and other links appear within backlink reports, but that alone doesn't indicate that the link is helping from a SEO perspective. Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog cleans out their bookmark links on a regular basis. As seen in ...

First Round Capital to open NYC office
Redeye VC — ... The right ecosystem can take good raw materials and set it lose on a new trajectory.  That’s why Stumbleupon moved from Calgary to San Francisco, why Jimmy Wales moved from Florida to San Francisco to start ...

Trending Topics: The New Internet Chat
Maximum PC all RSS Feed — ... , the system allows users of a web site to discuss and share information with others in a dedicated side-panel. This is also reminiscent of StumbleUpon and ...

StumbleUpon Recasts Itself As A Social Search Engine “Between Google And Twitter.”
TechCrunch — Ever since StumbleUpon spun itself off from eBay last April, it’s been reinventing itself at a rapid pace. In June, it launched Su.pr, its own URL shortening service, but that was just an interesting new product. Today, it is starting to roll out a major redesign that recasts the service as a social search engine “somewhere between a Twitter and Google,” says founder Garrett Camp. About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon, says Camp, to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. More than 35 million Web pages have ...

StumbleUpon Goes Search with New Incarnation
WebProNews Feed — ... Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO. "We are now combining the power of discovery with search--and offering another way for people to access over 35 million user-endorsed websites." With the new version of StumbleUpon, anyone can receive personalized recommendations directly from the StumbleUpon homepage, from any computer, without any registration or installation. The company says the new design makes it easier for new users to discover interesting content. The  company says the personal preferences and collaborative human ...

Youtego: Making Friends Through Self-Visualization
ReadWriteWeb — Some of the most viral experiences on the internet are also self-referential. Users spend hours on sites like StumbleUpon and Redux simply to build up their profiles and re-establish their status as coolhunters. While these sites exist as social tools for external exploration and discovery, Youtego offers a quiet approach to self-discovery. Sponsor In the past ReadWriteWeb covered Lunch.com - a friend-matching community service powered by a similarity ...

Developing Successful Viral Marketing Ideas
SearchEngineWatch Experts — ... and StumbleUpon , to discover what the big success stories were for industries related to yours. Then put a spin on it to tailor it to your industry. Sell women's clothing? Look at jewelry or cosmetics. Sell merchant account services? Find out what the business loan sites are doing. Represent a hotel or resort? Uncover tour operator strategies. Or examine what hotels are doing in different geographic areas. Fun with Customers For the daring and progressive companies, create a cartoon or video poking fun at customers. Everyone loves a good laugh and it's one of the most ...

Save our bookmarks: Yahoo's Delicious should become an aggregator
L.A. Times Tech Blog — Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in 2008 and now works for Google. Credit: Joi via Flickr Yahoo's social bookmarking website Delicious is looking less appetizing nowadays. Once the king of online link sharing and a pioneer in the concept of tagging ...

Meebo Gives Publishers More Control Over Meebo Bar With New API
TechCrunch — ... To help publishers get started, Meebo has built 10 premade buttons that they can quickly integrate. These include buttons to share to StumbleUpon or Digg, view your Facebook stream, and listen to music from ...