We are very proud to have Bdarbs as our first Stumbler Interview. Ben was about the first person your humble author met upon joining StumbleUpon. Ben has given me an extraordinary amount of quality help and advice, and I am proud to have him as our first interview!

Bdarbs StumbleUpon Profile

Ben is a 29 year old married guy from Sf Bay Area, California, USA.
Likes 2,832 pages, 65 videos, 61 photos • 249 fans • Received 37 reviews
Member since Jun 07, 2007

Hi I’m Ben Darbs (aka bdarbs / mrbubbleboy). I’ve developed quite an addiction to social networking and am active all day long on Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit looking to make friends and share the great stuff I find on the web. I am a former real estate investor (meaning I sold all my properties) and am now very active in the housing bubble blogger community. Most of My StumbleUpon discoveries are dedicated to housing news, although I’m a huge fan of education (particularly free education) and love to check out and comment on what my friends are stumbling. If you come across a great housing article, educational resource, or anything else that is noteworthy please share it with me. I’m always here to help out my friends, so drop me line or send me something to stumble anytime. | Digg Username: mrbubbleboy | Reddit Username: bdarbs | Mixx Username: bdarbs | AIM: bdarbs123 | Gtalk: bdarbs

Ben responds to the StumbleBlogger interview questions:

1. What caused you to join StumbleUpon and how long have you been Stumbling?

I first joined SU in June of 2007 and like most Stumblers, I didn’t
have a clue what I was doing for several months. Before then, I had
been very active in the housing bubble blogging community and was
looking to find alternative ways to gain exposure to the articles I
cared about.

2. What where your biggest challenges when you first started out?

Like many newbies, I was under the assumption that if you submit great
content, other users will find it and vote it up on their own. I was
wrong! I wasted a lot of time discovering articles that
never got a single review from another member. It wasn’t until I
began putting myself out there by making friends and
asking questions that I began learning how to be successful on
StumbleUpon.

3. What are the keys to success on StumbleUpon?

First, it is important to understand that people are on StumbleUpon
for a variety of reasons. Some are there to browse the internet,
others are there to meet people, and others like myself are there to
help my favorite articles gain exposure on the web.

With maximum exposure as the goal, I’d say there are 3 golden rules to
Stumbling.

A. Friend the right people. You want friends with the same common
goal as you, so you can get into a mutually beneficial friendship and
help each other. If you make friends with someone who has a different
agenda, you will probably end up wasting time and eventually annoying
each other.
B. Be a giver and not just a taker. Always go out of your way to
help people and you will end up with friends that are always willing
to help you. This takes time, but there is no other way around it.
You can’t expect your friends to review your stories if you don’t
reciprocate. Also, don’t be greedy. Even the best of friends can get
worn out if you ask them to stumble too often. I usually try not to
bother my friends more than once or twice a week.
C. Submit quality content. If the content quality isn’t there, you are
wasting your time and putting all your other efforts at risk. Some
of your friends may be willing to vote for crap content, but natural
users will eventually determine whether an article goes really popular
or not. If you submit crap, you also run the risk of losing other
(better) friends in the process. When a friend reviews a story, they
are putting their name behind it for all others to see. You want your
friends to be happy standing behind any story you ask them for help with.

4. Do you belong to any other social networking sites?

I’m active in Reddit and Digg
everyday… although I spend more time on SU than anywhere else.

5. Can you give us your thoughts on them?

Both Digg and Reddit have their pro’s and con’s. I appreciate Reddit
for its simplicity and that truly good content can reach the homepage
without a huge network of friends voting it up. The drawback with
Reddit is that networking is painful since there is no easy way to
determine who has befriended you and who is voting for your content.

Digg can be amazingly addicting. There is no other feeling in social
media quite like getting a story promoted to the Digg homepage. The
problem with Digg is it can feel a lot like a rat race, since success
there is all or nothing (either you reach the homepage in 24 hours or you don’t).
There has been a lot of controversy over at Digg about recent
algorithm changes and mysterious censorship / autoburying practices
which has caused me to spend even more time on Reddit and StumbleUpon.

5. What do you like best about the Stumbleupon experience?

The thing I like best about Stumbling is the ease of making quality
friends and communicating with them. I have no other friends in social
media as helpful as my Stumble friends. I also like how SU traffic
has more of an organic and natural feel than the other social media
sites. You can still have the potential of 15,000+ visitors in a day,
but that is usually just the beginning. I’ve had several stories
bring in considerable traffic over a month after I first discovered
them…which is nice:)

6. Is there any feature that you think SU is missing?

I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about missing SU
features. I always operate with the mindset of making the best with
what I have and concentrating on the stuff I can control. With that
said, it would be nice for networking purposes to see more than just
the first 35 people who thumb a story. Also, it would be helpful to
be able to sort your friends list alphabetically and export it. I
keep a spreadsheet of all my friends with notes about each of them,
which is a bit tedious to update when looking at the StumbleUpon UI.

7. Would you like to tell us a little more about yourself than is in
your profile?

I love playing sports and going to the gym to exercise, although
between being glued to my computer 12 hours a day and helping my wife
raise our 1 year old daughter….I don’t do these things as often as I would
like. Being a SF Bay Area native, I’m also a huge Golden State Warriors
basketball fan and am loving the fact that they are finally good again
and making a playoff push. It was a long, painful drought when they
were bad.