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Stumbler Interview with Miranda622

Kathy is a 26 year old married woman from Gray, Maine, USA.

Likes 4,234 pages, 143 videos, 140 photos • 232 fans • Received 60 reviews

Member since Aug 29, 2007

I live in a little town in Maine with my husband and some furred and feathered friends. I write for a website dedicated to good news and profiles of inspiring people and organizations called Gimundo. (Sign up for the RSS feed here, if you’re so inclined.) I share some of our stories here, along with tons of other interesting stuff I come across while looking for material. If you’re in the mood for good news, just check out the “gimundo” or “good news” tags on my page - you’ll feel better, promise.

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

I don’t remember exactly how I found StumbleUpon in the first place. According to my profile, I’ve been a member since August, but at the start, I only used it to occasionally bookmark links and do random stumbles without focusing on the community aspect. In December, I finally figured out how it was supposed to work, started my Stumble blog, and began adding friends. Now, I’m completely and utterly hooked – I even wrote an ode to SU on Gimundo a couple of months ago.

The coolest thing is, since my job involves spending hours online looking for interesting material to write about, StumbleUpon actually helps me. It’s so nice when something I’d do for fun anyway actually serves a productive purpose!

2. How did you come up with the idea for the Gimundo good news site?

Unfortunately, I can claim no credit whatsoever for the idea behind Gimundo. For that, you can thank the site’s founders, Chris Case and Keith Cohn, who’ve graciously allowed me to take on this incredible project.

A more thorough explanation is available on the site’s About Us page but in a nutshell, they got fed up with all the negativity and fear-mongering they saw in the mainstream media, and went looking for an alternative news source that spotlighted all the great stuff going on in the world. Since they couldn’t find one, they decided to create their own: Gimundo, a site that features only good news and positive, inspirational stories.

It’s not a replacement for the news – of course, it’s important for all of us to stay informed about what’s going on in the world – but it does help to know that good things ARE happening out there. Gimundo just helps shed a little light on all the great stories that don’t get the attention they deserve.

3. Do you have anything else in the works, or does Gimundo keep you busy enough?

Gimundo keeps me pretty busy, so I’m not doing much in the way of outside writing projects at the moment.

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

It’s always fun to look at other Stumblers’ pages and see what cool stuff they’re discovering – I try to stop in on my friends’ pages on a regular basis, and like to check out random Stumblers and friends-of-friends as well. I find lots of fun and quirky stuff in the “bizarre” topic, and I’m crazy about animals, so that’s definitely a favorite, too. Health, science, environmental, activism, journalism, photography, humor – it’s hard to pick, with so much great stuff out there. I also enjoy the StumbleThru feature – I use it most often for Wired and BBC News, so I can keep up on cool technological developments and international news stories.

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

I would love it if StumbleUpon could aggregate your friends’ latest finds by category, so instead of just looking at a general “What’s New” page on all topics, you could see a list of everything your friends have stumbled sorted out by topic, whether you’re looking for news, photography, videos, or anything else. It would also be great if SU got rid of the 200 friends limit – I’ve already reached mine, and don’t like having to take people off my list to add someone new.

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

I’m also a member of Digg (also under the screenname miranda622), and have been using it fairly often lately – I’m always happy to connect there too, so please add me to your friends list if you like. Care2 is a smaller site, but it’s also great for finding about political news, petitions, and activism, so I stop by there every so often, too.

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

I really love the random stumble feature. So often, I have no idea what I’m actually looking for, so it’s nice to be surprised and see pages that I wouldn’t have necessarily visited if I’d only seen the headline. “Send to a friend” is cool, too – I always love when people stumble me stuff, and I try to pass along stories and links that I think will interest people in my friends group from time to time. I also think that StumbleUpon has much more of a community spirit than the rest of the social news sites out there – I’ve found so many friendly, helpful, and intelligent people to talk to since I’ve started Stumbling.

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

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, but moved to Maine with my husband Jeff (thehawk78) just over a year ago. We’re avid animal lovers, with 2 Shih Tzus and 2 cockatiels. Since we both work from home, we get to spend all day with them, which is one of the coolest things in the world – it’s always fun to take puppy play breaks during the workday. My SU screenname is my middle name and birthday (Miranda comes from The Tempest – my father was a big Shakespeare buff.). I did an MFA in creative writing a couple of years ago, and did some freelance writing before I started working with Gimundo – if anyone’s interested in seeing some of those pieces, they can check out my portfolio at kathrynhawkins.com.

9. What would you say are the best tips for Stumbling success?

I probably have an unfair advantage over most people when it comes to Stumbling, since I have hundreds of RSS feeds set up for various sites, and spend time each day scouring through them all, looking for interesting material to cover for Gimundo. Whenever I find cool stuff that doesn’t work for Gimundo, I share it on my StumbleUpon blog instead.

The stuff I like to Stumble is usually a bit on the quirky side, generally fairly upbeat – though I’m interested in politics, it’s a pretty divisive subject, so I tend to leave it out of my blog. I do think that StumbleUpon is an amazing tool for getting the word out, though, so if there is a particular issue I’m concerned about, especially if there’s a simple way to get involved, I like to share it on my blog in hopes that others will take action too. Essentially, though, what I post is based on the premise that if it interests me, it’ll probably interest other people too. So far, that seems to be true!

The Visual SU Blog Post Editor

It’s time for another easy tip. Gmalonzo hinted at this one in a comment to our Tips and Tricks post on dressing up the reviews on pages that you liked. For those of you that blog on your SU favorites page, I hope that you have noticed the line above the posting text box that reads “Normal | Visual Editor.” If you click on “Visual Editor”, it brings up a set of icons that you can use to add a variety of formatting to your blog entry. As Gmalonzo said, since this feature also appears when you edit one of your reviews, you can also use it to clean up and dress up your reviews after the fact.

When you click on the “Visual Editor” link, it brings up an icon menu with formatting features similar to that of a word processor. This menu looks like the following graphic. I have added a number for each function and will use those numbers to explain each function in the area below the graphic.

visual_editor.gif

  1. Hide Visual Editor - This small triangle hides and exposes the visual editor controls. If you click it with the editor icons showing, it hides them, leaving just the triangle. Clicking the triangle again will expose the controls.
  2. Source – When only the formatted text is displayed, clicking on source will expose the code that controls the formatting. Clicking on it when the code is exposed will hide the code. Note that the functionality of the visual editor is not available when viewing the code window.
  3. Bold – Select the text that you want to format and click on this control to make the text bold. Can be combined with 4, 5 and 6.
  4. Italics - Select the text that you want to format and click on this control to italicize the text. Can be Combined with 3, 5, and 6.
  5. Underline - Select the text that you want to format and click on this control to underline the text. This option should be used sparingly, if at all, since underlined text looks very much like a link and might be confusing. Can be combined with 3, 4, and 6.
  6. Strikethrough - Select the text that you want to format and click on this control to show a strikethrough line through the text. Can be combined with 3, 4, and 5.
  7. Numbered List - Select all of the text in lines that you want to be a bulleted list and click on this control to add numbers and an indent.
  8. Bulleted List - Select all of the text in lines that you want to be a bulleted list and click on this control to add bullets and an indent.
  9. Font – Click on the triangle at the right of this box to drop down a list of fonts to use for text that you have highlighted. With the list showing, click on a font to select it.
  10. Size - Click on the triangle at the right of this box to drop down a list of font sizes to use for text that you have highlighted. With the list showing, click on a size to select it.
  11. Font Color – Highlight some text and then click on this box to change the color that is used to display it. Don’t choose the same color as the background of your page, or the highlighted text will effectively disappear.
  12. Background Color – Highlight some or all of the text in your post, then click on this icon to change the color of the background against which the text is displayed. This can be used to avoid the disappearing font issue noted in the item above.

The visual editor gives you a lot of control over the appearance of your blog posts and reviews. You should probably avoid going totally crazy, since most people are not all that thrilled about over-the-top formatting. It is probably better to go for subdued rather than crazy. :)

Stumbler Interview With MrBelding

Todd is a 28 year old guy in a relationship from San Francisco, California, USA.

Likes 2,427 pages, 47 videos, 64 photos • 156 fans • Received 33 reviews

Member since Oct 15, 2007

Interested in education, a wide variety of civil rights and environmental issues, people’s meandering travels through life, and great music unbeknownst to me. A former social worker in Chicago, now techie in San Fran. If you happen to stop by take a moment to say hi or friend me, I love getting the chance to chat and meet with new people.

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

I’ve been stumbling for just under 6 months now. At the time I decided to join I had been a Digg and Reddit user, well more of a lurker, for some time. It was around that time that I decided to be an active participant in social media and submit content. StumbleUpon was initially an alternative to those outlets and admittedly I knew very little about SU at the time. SU has quickly grown to be my favorite community.

2. How do you select your SU friends?

Probably the biggest thing I look for is high level of activity. I like to engage with others who use SU on a regular basis. There’s no real method to my madness, I don’t base my friends on how many pages a person has liked or how many friends they have but I take notice of those who have thumbed and reviewed a page that I like as well. Over time I get a good sense of who might be a good stumble friend. I have many casual friends but I generally tend to enjoy members who are actively a part of the conversation in the community. I also look for friends who may be crossovers from other social media communities I am apart of.

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

I am most interested in stumbling topics about people or topics that affect the average person. I specifically enjoy issues pertaining to access to higher education, civil rights, and more recently environmental issues. My focus of study in college was on race, class, and gender inequality and I still tend to view the world through that scope. When I see policy changes and ideological shifts at any level of society I think of how that will impact the lives of everyday people. I also enjoy stumbling music and of course the random silly picture or video.

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

I saw a post recently that I liked by Akstumble at OldSchool SEO where he suggested being able to organize your friends based on interest, I like that concept quite a bit. I also like the general ideas of being able to add more than the 200 limit of friends and being able to see more than the limited amount of users who have stumbled your submissions. I think in time all social sites adapt and grow so I’ll be interested in seeing what SU will implement in the future.

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

Yes currently I belong to Digg, Reddit and the new Social News Central.

My Digg Page
My Reddit Page
My Social News Central Page

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

Of course all of the social sites have their advantages and disadvantages but what I really enjoy about SU is the interaction with other users. I think the way the community is set up lends itself to more engaging interaction with each other. And in my experience for the most part, SU users tend to be more willing to participate in constructive and positive conversation with each other. Many friends that I have on Digg and Reddit I didn’t really become social with until we met up on SU.

7. Who are your favorite users within StumbleUpon?

There are so many people its hard to only name a few. I’ve had great conversations with the likes of people such as WordsnCollision, TalSiach, kdfrawg, bamafun, phillyLA, and Tamar.
I also enjoy a lot of the content that I’ve been given from people such as gbarberi1, socialpyramid, mokkikunta, jonathan-fields and more recently the feloniousrambler….but thats all just naming a few.

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

I probably have a more unlikely path to the virtual world than most. My background is based more in social work rather than social media. From high school through my mid twenties I worked mainly with underclass citizens and people living with disabilities to help them find everything from housing to employment. I also traveled the country for a few short years playing what we in the US consider professional rugby. I use professional lightly because its anything but glamorous here and its a hard lifestyle but I was able to travel from coast to coast and I have met great friends from every country imaginable. I also consider Wrigley Field the center of the universe.

9. What would you say are the best tips for StumbleUpon success?

I am no guru but I do believe that a couple of basic fundamental qualities can get you far, or at least set up a good foundation.

Simple things such as adding constructive and positive discourse to the community, having real conversation, not always asking but also giving, reading the things you are sent, going out of your way to help friends when needed.

They may seem basic in nature by many people miss the mark, Rabeidoh has actually written a few good blog posts recently on social graces.

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

Drop me a line, let’s chat it up.

Is Captcha Coming to StumbleUpon?

Just a word to the wise. We may all be entering the obscured and twisted words from those weird Captcha illustrations, like the one to the left, every time we send a message using Stumble-Mail. I suppose it is a logical step to take, given that spam is everywhere else on the planet, and the growth of the use of Captcha everywhere. Of course, this may all be mitigated by the recent news that spam-bots could read some Captcha-clues. The games of cat and mouse continue.

A couple of times yesterday, while sending Stumble-Mail messages to friends, I was asked to read the little Captcha obscured wavy-word illustrations and enter two words in a text box before the Stumble-Mail message could be sent. I would consider temporary hallucinations a possibility, but my SU friend Jaybol reported seeing the very same phenomenon. I believe that what we were seeing was a live test of the function by SU programmers.

We can only surmise that SU is suffering from Spambots, or that they are worried that they are about to be suffering from Spambots. We can see how it would be possible to register an account, then use a program to make friends and send spam to them. We don’t know how profitable this would be for the spammers, but I admit that I have never understood how there could be enough dim people on the planet to make any sort of spam profitable. That just goes to show you how wrong we can be.

How Does Nobody Specific Discover A Page?

I debated about even putting this into a column about tips and tricks. It is, certainly, a tip about a trick. It is not, however, completely positive. Instead, all it can be is a description of something that you can do within the StumbleUpon system that is not directly available from a menu. This particular thing, however, does not seem to do anybody much good.

Surely, you have been Stumbled onto a page which says at the top that the page was discovered by Someone. That says, of course, that the system does not know by whom that page was found. How the heck can that happen? If the page was discovered, somebody had to do it, right?

Well, no, not really. The method by which this occurs is not really very intuitive. It took us a bit of thought to figure it out, but we finally did. Here is the way that you, too, can discover a page that winds up without your name on it.

1. Find an undiscovered page.
2. Send that page to a friend using the “Send To” function in the toolbar.
3. There is no step 3.

How does this work? Although this is just a guess, the SU system has to keep track of the page involved in the “Send To” operation in some way. It seems to do that by registering the page, which automatically places that page in the system with no known discoverer. Generally, there is also no topic assigned, either, although this does not always appear to be true. Instead, the entry at the top of the review page says something like “Someone discovered this. The topic is unknown.”

There is not real advantage to this method of discovery, except to discover and put into the system a page that you do not want to take credit for. We have done a couple of tests, and a page discovered in this manner seems to perform less well than one discovered by conventional means. That is to say, it is apparently not displayed to as many Stumblers, and therefore stands less of a chance of being reviewed or thumbed up.

Well, now at least you know how that happens. Some people that I mentioned it to were sort of impressed that it could happen at all. But that’s all this trick has to offer. We’ll try to do better next time

Dress Up Your Comments

We are going to ease into the “StumbleUpon Tips” arena very slowly. There are a lot of things that you can do to make your entries in StumbleUpon more attractive and more noticeable. Today’s tip is going to be the easiest of all. However, it will let you dress up your reviews of pages just a little bit, perhaps enough to get you noticed a little more than you are already. And that may bring more people to your blog page.

It is going to involve writing a little HTML. Very little, as a matter of fact, not enough to be the least bit difficult. We are going to learn how to turn italics mode on and off, and how to turn bold mode on and off. These are simple things, but they will make your comments look much more stylish. Don’t use them all the time or people will just think that you are showing off, which will send fewer people to your blog page. :) When you are typing your page review into the text box SU provides for that purpose, you can do the following:

To turn italics on, type <em> (em stands for “emphasis”) and to turn them off, type </em>. So, in order to dress up “This is a plain comment.” write “This is <em>a plain</em> comment.” in the text box and what readers will see is “This is a plain comment.”

To turn on bold mode, type <b> (“b” for “bold”) and to turn it off, type </b>. So, in order to make “This is a plain comment.” more attractive write “This is <b>a plain</b> comment.” and what readers will see is “This is a plain comment.”

You can even combine the two, typing “This is a <em><b>fancy</b></em> comment” which will turn into “This is a fancy comment” when you save your review.

I should point that part out, too. As long as you type the markup commands in pairs, like <em>something</em> everything between the “<” and “>” angle brackets will disappear from the final displayed comment when you save your page review, as will the angle brackets themselves. If you forget to type in the closing </em> or </b> markup commands, some odd-looking text might be the result. So make sure to use the command in on-off pairs.

You’re now on your way to fancier page reviews. We’ll cover another way to make your StumbleUpon experience fancier in our next Tips column.

SU Alerter is a Cool Utility for Stumbleupon

Adamant Solutions in Australia (and our friend Moojj) has just released the Beta of their new utility called StumbleUpon Alerter. Let me reproduce Adamant’s description of the software here.

StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up. Open the main window to view information about each discovery - including a list of people who have reviewed, thumbed up or thumbed down your sites.

Plays a sound whenever a person reviews your discoveries
Plays a sound when one of your discoveries is liked
Displays a list of your discoveries on StumbleUpon
Shows a list of people who have rated your sites
Lists all of the reviews for your discoveries
Ranks your friends in order of most reviews
Made with the same interface as StumbleUpon

SU Alerter is available for download here. The utility is small (1725 KB) and the download is fast. The installation is standard and similarly painless. It took just the blink of an eye on my desktop workstation. Put itself into my system try and set itself to run on boot, which is the best way to make the tool useful. It also created a link to Adamant Solutions website on my desktop, which was probably not intentional. I think it was supposed to have been a link to the program. This is a Beta, after all.

That’s it. And it works exactly as advertised. Click on the SU icon on your system tray and you will see a list of sites that you have discovered. You can get three views of these, each in a different tab. The first, called “Home,” identifies the domain name of the page you discovered, the people that have thumbed it (up or down) and the number of reviews written. The “People” tab is ordered by the people rather than by the page, and the last tab (“Websites”) is ordered by the domains in which pages were discovered.

Update - 03-06-08: As with any beta, there have been a couple of minor problems with this one. We are in contact with Moojj about this. If you have comments or requests, you can leave them here and we will forward them to the author, or use the link to his site above to leave a message there. Thanks!

Moojj at Adamant Software has just released a patch that fixes the known problems. You can download the patch here. You can also use this link to download the program for the first time. Kudos to Moojj for being so responsive! Great job!

If you like to watch the progress of the pages that you have discovered, and see whether other people like them, too, then this StumbleUpon utility is for you. We highly recommend it!

SU Is a More Appropriate Tool for Parents Than for Kids

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Stumbler FeloniousRambler noticed an article in Parenting Magazine about StumbleUpon and sent me the following excerpt:
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“Welcome to the latest internet phenomenon. StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (as opposed to a search engine like Google) that allows you to find interesting content on the web without knowing exactly what you are looking for. Just go to StumbleUpon.com, fill out your personal preferences, and download (for free) the browser to your toolbar. (Note: this is a cool tool for mom and dad — not the kids.) Anytime you click the icon, SU will bounce you around the internet to different websites, videos, pictures, games, blogs, and more. Every site you land on is in sync with your interest and recommended by like-minded Web surfers. The best part: The more you click, the better it gets at knowing your likes and dislikes. So stumble away!”

I don’t know that it’s the latest internet phenomenon, but it is, of course, the best. :) And the article makes a valid point. StumbleUpon is almost certainly a better tool for adults than it is for children. It would be pretty easy for a child to use an adult’s SU account to find material that they are probably not ready for.

So if you’re a parent, and if you share your computer with your kids, it may be wise to make sure that they don’t use StumbleUpon unless you are with them. Children are incredibly clever, and in no time at all could have your SU account set for all sorts of adult topics as things you would like to see, just so they can.

A word to the wise parent: StumbleUpon is a great Web Discovery tool for adults, but perhaps it is best kept out of the hands of children.

Stumbler Interview - Mokkikunta

mokki is a guy from Lisbon, Portugal.

Likes 1,461 pages, 16 videos, 151 photos • 74 fans • Received 14 reviews

Member since Jan 03, 2008

I like independent / alternative news and the blogosphere. I try to process the mainstream media information through critical thinking. I don’t want to be merely a consumer of spectacular distractions. Visit my personal blog mokkikunta. I’m editor of the lusofinnish community site Lusofin and of the group blog Regions. I am also one of the Ovimagazine team members.

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

Stumbleupon is a social networking service, which provides the users with a toolbar having various functions. We can explore the web, add pages to favorites (or dislike them), tag the visited pages, share them with our friends and write reviews.

At the same time, we can select our preferred channels (images , videos, selected sites, favorites’ friends, queries, news) and we can also navigate through selected topics.Based on preferences previously defined by the user and selected toolbar options, StumbleUpon takes each of us to both an individual and a collective discovery. We are able to directly view interesting pages’ content on our monitors. We can also make posts on our blog page, another interesting StumbleUpon’ service.

I’m a member of StumbleUpon since January. I find this service very collaborative, making it possible to share information in a pleasant way. StumbleUpon members can also browse people, send and receive mail, utilize a chat room, and join various groups for discussions and interaction.

Many of these features, of which I had only superficial knowledge before, influenced my decision to join and stay with the network.

What do you like best about the StumbleUpon experience?

One of the best things, including the interaction between members, is the direct interaction with the content and the fact we don’t need any kind of previous descriptions to visualize it. We can assess it immediately and if we liked, we can review it and publish it in our StumbleUpon blog. Another great feature is the freedom of choice to select the language of the pages.

What are your favorite StumbleUpon topics, and why?

Due to my profession (I am an engineer) I’m obviously very interested in topics like the environment , transportation, engineering, urbanism and economics.

In addition to these professionally oriented topics, I’m interested in geographic locations like Finland and Portugal, and in local, decentralized, green and alternative perspectives on society.

This is because I have strong relations with Finland. I visit often the 1000 Lakes Region often and I very much like the interaction of the Finnish people with nature For this reason, I created a blog about the Finnish Model, in the perspective of decentralization and municipalism (Finland and Portugal: two distant territories, two decentralization forms).

I’m also a collaborator of the Ovi Magazine. Ovi Magazine is a daily English Online Magazine from Finland on culture, society, art, cartoons, politics and contemporary news from around Europe and the world.

In addition, I’m one of the editors of the lusofinnish community site Lusofin and of the Portuguese group blog Regioes.

Is there any feature that you think SU is missing?

First, I think that there are two decisive factors which can change the model of global internet traffic by eliminating technological divisions at the global level. One is the development of a worldwide communications infrastructure, and the other one is the proliferation of cheap technological products.

The transformation of Russia, China and India into technological powers can also modify the linguistic aspect of the Internet. The irrelevancy of the distances, as well the instant access of companies and persons to the world market, could then become a reality.

It seems to me, then, that the software used in social networking sites such as StumbleUpon should adapt to the linguistic realities – it’s obvious they don’t want to lose substantial market shares - by implementing sophisticated translation software and other related tools.

Do you belong to any other social networking sites?

Yes. I belong to the following social networking sites:

Digg
My Digg Page

del.icio.us
My del.icio.us page

Flickr
My flickr Page

Socialnews Central

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

I would appeal to the Stumbling universe to contribute to a more open and collaborative social media network where information could be universally shared in freedom; to contribute to a democratic , transparent and autonomous network, built by its users, who are both the producers and the consumers of information.

The exponential grow of some social networking sites raises new issues in their communities. The impact of growth must be considered both in terms of service efficiency and in terms of the quality of the online democracy. The growing distances between site administration and users at some sites could be an indicator of democratic deficiencies in these communities.

The new information technologies facilitate cooperation among people on a larger scale than ever before. Although the growing volume of data could lead to a dehumanized management of information, it must not necessarily be so. The social networks users should be attentive to these issues, which affect the opportunities for the true participation of all citizens in the online world.

Letters, We Get Letters

We really appreciate the response of our readers to our questions yesterday about what you want to see at StumbleBlogger. A lot of you stopped by and told us exactly how you felt, and that is exactly what we wanted. We learned a lot and we are already taking action to give it to you. There is no sense in doing this if we don’t do our best to make the readers happy!

First, we have done a little redesign of the site. We have toned down the colors. We have changed the “graphics” while still keeping it simple. The new Stumbler motif at the top left is pretty unmistakable. We have made the comment font larger and have stopped forcing comment text to upper case. We are going to move the ads into one sidebar, leaving all of the navigation in the other.

We may change to a three-column format with both sidebars on the right, again with ads in only one sidebar at the far right, if we can find a theme in that configuration that we like and which is compatible with the current WordPress version. Because I want this site to be about content and not about a pretty photo in the header, I’m going to try to keep it simple. If we don’t change themes to one with a black font, we’ll at least go with a much darker gray on this one.

(UPDATE 3-2-08 : We found an excellent theme, did a bunch of customization, and now have a completely different look. The graphics (such as they are) are different, we have two right sidebars with ads in one and navigation in the other, and we think it’s cooler. We hope you like it, too.)

As much as we appreciate your comments on look and feel, the subject of content is more important to us. We hear the following loud and clear:

You want how-to posts, for things like adding videos and pictures to your SU blog pages, and how to use a little code to make your SU page more interesting.

You want more posts about how to use StumbleUpon to get the most out of it, whatever your aims, and the etiquette of social media sites in general.

You would like more posts about how StumbleUpon works under the hood. Harder, but we’ll get right on it.

You want more posts on social media in general, as long as they are applicable to the world of Stumblers.

I also think that we are going to try polls, so that we can get some votes going on part of these things. I need to find a good polling package (maybe Democracy) that I can put in the sidebar, maybe between the ads. :) I am also giving some consideration to using a magazine theme, with news and features, and multiple posts per day.

Most of all, keep those suggestions coming!

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