Kathy is a married woman from Missouri, USA.

Likes 522 pages, 8 videos, 11 photos • 83 fans • Received 27 reviews

Member since Mar 29, 2007 Hi, I am Kathy. I am one of the owners and President of Shakadoo, a weblog devoted to life around the home. From decorating, to family life, to lawn and garden, to real estate matters, we cover all the topics. One of my capacities on Shakadoo is as the real estate advice guru “Jill”. My experience comes from being a top selling Realtor for over 11 years in the Suburbs of Missouri. I am married, have 3 kids and a dog. My life is insane but never to busy to make new friends!

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

I joined StumbleUpon after I launched my family of Blogs called Shakadoo.com. I was looking for good content and other great blogs that I could promote on my sites. I also wanted to reach out to friends knowing that others likely knew more than me and I could learn from them. I have learned a lot.

2. What are your favorite StumbleUpon topics, and why?

I don’t know that I have just one favorite. I love all of the beautiful photos that I get to view, but I think I gravitate mostly to the home and family topics as well as topics pertaining to running a blog and social networking; and of course, real estate.

3. You have so much going on, with your real estate career and the Shakadoo website. How do you keep it all in balance?

Uuuhhmmm, balance? Yea, still trying to figure that one out. I pretty much work 24/7 and that’s killing me. Even if there were 48 hours in a day, I still don’t think I would get everything done that I’d like to accomplish. I have a pretty great staff that works for me, but my goal is to put a few more systems in place to free up a little bit more time for my family. The problem is I love to work! It’s addicting and exhilarating.

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

Yes, I hate that you can’t send to multiple friends at a time. I know they have this set up to avoid spamming your friends, but if they are truly our friends, then we should be able to control the spamming ourselves. You can always cast away a friend if they are abusing the system. It is just so cumbersome to send things to each friend separately. I would spend a lot more time on stumble if they changed that set up.

5. How often do you Stumble? Do you keep track of about how much time you spend Stumbling every day?

Every day is different. For a while there I was Stumbling a couple of hours a day. But I am really picky about what I thumb and review. I don’t want just any old thing reflecting on me. But I took a bit of a hiatus the early part of this year. I was traveling almost every other week, from February through April and it really cut into the Stumble time. I am picking it back up again now, but I plan to keep a limit on my time spent stumbling to about 30-45 minutes a day. I was a bit addicted before, and now I have to manage my time better.

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

Not actively enough to say that I do. I tried to get started on a couple of others but the time restraints limit me. I can only do so much in a day. I did have my partner start on Digg, Mixx and Facebook. She still prefers StumbleUpon too though. It’s a little easier to get started on and our results are better.

7. If so, in what ways does StumbleUpon compare favorably with the others?

Even though my answer was technically no, I do feel that StumbleUpon is a very easy format. It’s a lot easier to make friends and then your off and running. It’s idiot proof for the most part.

8. Could you tell us a little about your real-world life, and perhaps a little more about Shakadoo?

You mean talk about myself??? I’d love to! I was born and raised in St. Louis, MO and now live in a suburb of St. Louis called St. Charles. I have been happily married for nearly 15 years and have three children. My oldest is a boy who is 13. I also have a 10 year old daughter and my baby is a girl as well who just turned 3 on Cinco de Mayo. What a fun birthday! Eleven years ago I started in real estate as a stay home mom thinking I would work a few hours a week and make a little extra spending money. Well, I guess the Big Guy upstairs had different plans for me. Just newly licensed, my business began to thrive almost overnight, and I now have the number one RE/MAX team in the Missouri Region. Then about two years ago I was introduced to blogging though my real estate channels. I decided I was going to create a local blog to coincide with my real estate business. I met with a friend to hire her to help get the local businesses involved with my blog. She was a real enthusiastic person and went home to study up on what a blog was. She ran across an article that talked about how blogging was in its infancy and was about to explode. She shared the article with me and my partner and we began to explore the possibilities. I had a vision for what I wanted. “Everything to do with your home” kept coming to mind but I wanted something catchy. I started thinking about slang words used for homes. “Shak” kept haunting me and I settled on that. The “adoo” was just a natural fit. From there, we got together and started thinking of all of the categories for home and family and had a blast coming up with names that played off of “Shak” that same afternoon. We met with my partner and brained stormed more on the concept and before we knew it Shakadoo was born. Now, it’s “For Everything to do with your Shak”!

We settled in on nine topics all pertaining to life in and around the home. Nine separate blogs power Shakadoo: Love Shak Baby is our popular parenting and family blog (mommy blog), Shak In Style is our Design and Décor place, ShakHammer is where you come for DIY projects and construction, ShakTronics specializes in home electronics and gadgets, Shakyard cultivates lawn and garden tips, Work Shak is the place to go for work from home issues and work products, Loan Shak covers financial issues and mortgages, Shak and Jill is our real estate category which includes an advice forum answered by our real estate guru “Jill” (aka, yours truly) and last but not least Animal Shak for the pets we love to love. Shakadoo is still a work in progress as we plan to have more topics in the future and are considering adding an online décor store as well as expanding the real estate features. We just celebrated our first birthday in February of this year. Unfortunately I spend most of my time behind the scenes of Shakadoo running the business, but my goal for this year is to carve out more time so that I can do more blogging and interacting on the site as well as networking more. I love the people aspect of it but I get buried in the day to day stuff that has robbed me of that.

9. What would you say are the best ways to guarantee that a person can have a really wonderful StumbleUpon experience?

Give first and reach out. Make friends and take care of them and take time to review. Giving something a thumb takes no time at all, but reviewing someone’s piece or pick shows that you took the time to really look at it. And, use tags.

10. If you could say one thing to the rest of the Stumbling universe, what would it be?

Clear out your friends every once in a while! With Stumble’s limitation on friends, the early Stumblers are closed off to those of us who discovered it later in the game. It’s a shame that so many people that I like and admire; I can’t connect with because they are at their maximum. If we all checked out friendships every so often and cleared out the friends that aren’t active anymore, we could reach across those lines and connect with more people.