Usually I’m the last one to sign up for new services like MyBlogLog, Digg (okay—Digg’s not so new anymore), etc., so after hearing Shoemoney’s show last week where he and Kris Jones discuss BumpZee I figured I’d try to break my pattern by registering and giving it a whirl.  I just installed the BumpZee plug in for WordPress a few minutes ago so I’m still totally new to the product, but it seems pretty cool to me.

I really like the idea behind BumpZee (if I understand it correctly ;)) which seems to basically categorize blog posts based on ‘community’ (topic, in other words) and then rank them in a Digg-like fashion. 

This is convenient because unless you have an insane amount of time to spend you probably won’t subscribe to the Digg RSS even though it might have some great stuff.  I tried that subscription a while back and found myself wasting hours going through the interesting, but often unimportant posts there.  With BumpZee, however, the posts you ‘subscribe’ to are going to be much more relevant to your niche.  Furthermore, the social media ranking element helps make sure the posts you see are ones that other users, ideally interested in the same topics as you, thought were important. 

We’ll see how this develops and works out but I think it has a lot of potential.  Readers (like Google Reader of Blog Lines) are cool but the problem is bloggers, even the ones I really like, often blog about things I have no interest in or just don’t have time to go through.  Sadly, this has resulted in me unsubscribing from a lot of good blogs that post a high percentage of things I’m just not looking for.  Actually the concept is something I’d thought of doing myself with an old domain I never put into use—SEOforSEOs.com (the stuff on there is an old business idea I never followed through on)—so it’s cool to see someone else had the same idea and appears to have done a great job launching it.

  

Tags: bump, zee,, bumpzee,, scott, jangro,, jangro,, seo,, blogs

  

After reading Kris Jones’ summary of Neil Patel’s presentation of Social Media sites like Stumble Upon and Digg at the Elite Retreat, I thought I’d share some data on my first experience with the Digg-esque Stumble Upon network that seems to be growing increasingly popular.

While I was at Affiliate Summit West (2007), I noticed one of my main sites got a burst of nearly 1,100 uniques more than usual (in one day). When I went into my analytics, I was surprised to find that this traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. I had never used Stumble Upon myself, but was vaguely acquainted with it because of some discussions on the Digital Point Forums.

Anyway, I have no ads on this site and don’t monetize it in any way at this point, so I can’t share any data on CTR or conversions, but what I have found interesting is the fact that I am still getting traffic from StumbleUpon today, two months after the big burst. It’s nothing major, but on some days it’s about 150 uniques which is pretty cool. Furthermore, I didn’t Stumble Upon my own site nor submit it in any way–it was all natural, which was also very cool (in fact I wasn’t even registered with Stumble Upon when the traffic first came).

In case anyone’s interested, here’s a graph showing my traffic from Stumble Upon alone over the last two months:

Just thought I’d share this experience so others know Stumble Upon might be worthwhile. Of course the cool part isn’t the traffic itself, but the links these visitors have added to their blogs, etc.