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!

It’s time for another easy tip. 

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.
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.
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.

mokki is a guy from Lisbon, Portugal.
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