Stumbleupon.com
So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html. A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me. So it’s spam, right?
Well, technically. StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header. But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.
It turns out to be a social-network Alexa. And it’s really cool, and highly reliable. You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.
I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites. They are wonderful. Haven’t hit a bad one yet. And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good. But I expect they are.)
Check it out. It’s really good. And check out this, this, and this for fun.
The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.
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May 16th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
I thought it was spam too until you pointed out it wasn’t. Trying it out, after 20 stumbles, I had already seen 4 sites, heard about 2 of them, and already had 1 bookmarked, leaving 14 that I hadn’t seen before. That’s pretty good, though it’s a small sample set.
It looks like you can hack URLs in the format of http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/justagwailo.com/ (replace my weblog’s URL with yours), and that one person said my site didn’t render well in Firefox. That was before the current redesign, though, so that’s no longer true.
May 24th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Isn’t it amazing how StumbleUpon has been around for years and now seems to be exploding! It is good for those with a site and those looking for a site. It has also inspired similar search tools, such as the “ranDUMBizer.” This tool is different though, it allows you to plug in a site that you already visit and enjoy, so that it pulls up random sites that are similar to the site you already know you like (so I suppose it isn’t so random!). It is based on proprietary clustering technology from the Dumbfind search engine. It is in an early beta stage right now, but I see it going places. Check it out! http://www.dumbfind.com/randumbizer/
May 30th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Some spam is interesting enough to leave….
September 8th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Hi,
I think the exploding popularity of StumbleUpon is related to the popularity of Firefox and its extensions. At least that the way I learned about it (before I began to check my httpd log files ;-))
Moritz
February 21st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
[…] gave you the StumbleUpon “wrapper” page. As discussed in 2006, it’s a system worth […]