Stumbled Upon A Social Tagging System

Recently, this weblog hooked up with StumbleUpon, a tagging system based on social networking principles. This weblog now allows visitors to stumble a particular post and somebody did for one one on healthcare. At first I was only interested in how my weblog integrated with it, but was pleasantly surprised after exploring a bit more.

It is definitely preferable to digg to my mind, but my criteria seems to be different from many people. Popularity is not the most important factor for me. The wisdom of the crowds concept is one that has not been fully vetted as of yet. StumbleUpon does though add some weight to the pro argument. StumbleUpon has an appeal to serendipity inherent within it which is a concept appreciated by this weblog. Pressing the Stumble! button on the taskbar seems to randomly generate a new and interesting weblink based upon my previous provided areas of interest.

There is also some argument for StumbleUpon being better for what this weblog seeks to get out of blogging than digg though there are no doubt advantages to both systems. This weblog also recently started using aiderss, which reports the number of "conversations" on delicious, Google and digg, to rank its own posts and the weblinks it endeavors to promote. For this weblog's top 20 posts, the vast majority were listed primarily by del.icio.us, then Google, with only a few listed by digg.

The various weblinks developed over the short life of this weblog and found under del.icio.us and other tagging systems have been submitted to StumbleUpon with a number of them being designated "discovered". There is also a StumbleUpon access button under the Lijit widget.

There does seem to be a greater tendency to seek high numbers within the digg community more so than with other sites. Near-Revolt on Digg Underscores Site's Dependence on Its Users via Wired: Top Stories by Betsy Schiffman on 1/24/08 which deals with a narrowly averted boycott of Digg by some of its most prolific users shows just how dependent social media sites are on the goodwill of their audiences. This all can arguably be related to the recent debate ongoing about Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point concept.