One of my pet obsessions at the moment, besides Pidgin and chat bots, are keyboard shortcuts. Not only does it make me faster and more efficient at computer tasks but a lot of browser & toolbar features can be disabled because there are keyboard equivalents. One prime example is Stumbleupon.

If you have the Stumbleupon toolbar installed, there is a feature in the options which allows you to set up keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are already pre-programmed but you can do what I did and re-program them to the way you want them :

(more…)

Technorati Tags: keyboard, Productivity, shortcuts, Stumbleupon

If you’ve been a subscriber to this blog for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that sometimes you will get a post with my recent del.icio.us links in it (courtesy of an automated service by Feedburner). In the past couple of days, that post has suddenly got bigger.

This is all due to a brilliant Greasemonkey script that I have found called Delicious Stumbles. It basically adds a button to your standard Del.icio.us submission box which allows you to submit the same link, along with the same description and keywords, to Stumbleupon at the same time.

This is an absolute God-send for me. I love using Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon but at heart I am a bit lazy and I like things to be simple. If I bookmark one site on one bookmarking site, I am normally not inclined to start the process to submit it to the other site.  It’s too much time and too much clicking around. So as a result, I go through a big del.icio.us phase then a big Stumbleupon phase, then back to del.icio.us again…..this makes being a member of these sites rather haphazard as no-one knows when my next contribution will be. This has meant I have never been able to gain any traction or momentum on these sites.

But the Delicious Stumbles script means I can now submit to both sites simultaneously and it works PERFECTLY!

If you use Firefox and Del.icio.us / Stumbleupon, I highly recommend you use this script!

Technorati Tags: delicious, Firefox, Greasemonkey, hack, hacks, script, social network, Stumbleupon

There’s one thing I know for sure - instant messaging networks have come a long way over the past few years and the uses that people have thought up for them have progressed beyond mere chatting and LOL’ing.

Here’s two :

Creating link-sharing request networks : I have been approached by people very active on places like Digg and Stumbleupon, asking me to approve them on my IM contact list, and me on theirs. Not really to chat but mainly to digg and stumble their links and they would do the same for me in return. The person with the link would just open a chat window and send the link to everyone in the list with the request “digg / stumble please”.

One guy told me he had 20-30 people in his network all digging and stumbling each other’s work. There’s been a lot of grumbling about how flawed the Digg Shout system is and so people seem to be turning instead towards IM programs to do their own informal “shouts”.

I am not sure if asking someone to digg / stumble your personal posts goes against the TOS of these sites but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. If you have a weblink you want to instantly get out there, you can quickly ask everyone on your network to digg and stumble it for you.

For such a network to be truly effective though, you would need to have some diggers / stumblers on your list that are at least a bit influential on the sites. Kevin Rose would be a good choice on the Digg side although I seriously doubt he would agree to be on any IM network that I have just described. If you have a lot of contacts who are not so high up in the site’s hierachy then the stumbles and diggs they could do would have a limited effect.

For a list of top diggers, check out this list. For a list of top Stumblers, there are two lists in existence, one here and one here.

An unique twist on the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” concept.

Controlling web-based services from the PC desktop

I recently posted about this on Geeks Are Sexy with a follow-up today. More and more online services are setting up IM access to their services, sometimes using Twitter as a conduit.

The top ones - Twitter, Facebook (in a kind of roundabout way using Twitter as the middleman), Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and all the major blogging platforms (including Wordpress). Just see my Geeks Are Sexy article for more details.

A lot of them are controlled through IMified which is easy to set up.

Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, google talk, IM, imified, Instant Messaging, networking, Stumbleupon, Twitter

I have been spending the last hour or so going through my backlog of online reading material and I came across a post on Daily Blog Tips which suggests exchanging social networking usernames. This amazingly simple request has sparked 83 comments and it has made me realise that sometimes you don’t have to write something really sophisticated to draw in the readers - you just have to propose something mutually beneficial.

So, call me a copycat if you want but here are my social networking ID’s. Feel free to leave yours in the comments and I will add you to my lists. However, with Stumbleupon, I have to be extremely selective whom I add because of their absurd rule that you can only have 200 friends. To the best of my knowledge, Digg and Del.icio.us have no such limits.

Stumbleupon :  http://camelot2302.stumbleupon.com/
Digg :  http://www.digg.com/users/camelot2302
Del.icio.us :  http://del.icio.us/camelot2302
Facebook :  http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=505107042
Twitter :  http://twitter.com/camelot2302

I am considering opening an account at Reddit.    If I decide to do that, I’ll add that ID to the list.

Technorati Tags: bookmarking, delicious, Digg, Facebook, networking, reddit, social, social-networks, Stumbleupon, Twitter

Rumours about Skype is practically an industry in its own right. Never does a week go by without another rumour floating around about who could be buying them next, why it’s taking eBay so long to integrate Skype into eBay listings and where the company is going (and not going). The latest rumour to start floating around cyberspace is that Google could be interested in buying them.

I actually hope that this is a rumour that will eventually come true. I have been consistently shocked at how eBay bought Skype then threw them in the corner forgotten and unloved like one of their trashy auctions, where they made an impulse buy then regretted it the next day. I mean, look at how they have neglected Stumbleupon. They buy it then ignore it, except for putting a Stumble link on the eBay tools page. Gee thanks Meg Whitman.

Google on the other hand could integrate Skype into Google in so many different ways. Imagine a pumped up Google Talk, an integrated Google / Skype phone, a Skype application with a powerful Google search facility to find phone numbers in any country in the world (the phonebook on steroids!)

Download Squad speculates that we may even get developer API’s and even the Skype source code, in order for Skype third-party applications to be developed. So it would move from eBay’s Web 1.0 atmosphere to Google’s Web 2.0 atmosphere - and improvements may come as a result.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Skype to finally be properly appreciated by someone? I think it’s time for eBay to start their own auction - to sell Skype to someone who’ll actually do something meaningful with it.

Technorati Tags: eBay, Google, Skype, Stumbleupon, VOIP

I have to admit it took some time for me to be sold on this one but now that I’ve tried it out, I’m hooked.

The “Read It Later” Firefox extension allows you to mark webpages to a reading list so you can come back to them later. I initially didn’t see the point of it as I normally just bookmark webpages along with any other webpages. But I perhaps bookmark 50 webpages a day (a conservative estimate) and it is becoming more and more difficult to separate the news stories from the new web apps. So by keeping all the news stories / blog ideas on the “Read It Later” extension, it makes it easier for me to find what I am looking for. Also a particularly good extension if I am in the middle of stumbling on Stumbleupon and I find pages I want to come back to later.

A must-have extension for bloggers and stumblers everywhere. But not everyone is sold on the idea.

Technorati Tags: extension, Firefox, read later, reading list, Stumbleupon

One of the scenarios which will face a blogger eventually is getting dugg on Digg. This can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. It’s a blessing in that the number of site visitors will probably hit the roof and with a bit of luck, your RSS subscriber count will also go up. It’s also a curse because your site will most probably collapse due to the overwhelming surge in visitors. The classic catch-22.

But for a lot of dugg stories, it can take quite a while for the “Digg Effect” to kick in. In fact a lot of stories don’t get anymore than 10 diggs before fading into obscurity. So it’s quite often the case that you don’t realise you’re being dugg unless someone points it out to you.

So I have started to monitor certain domains on Digg using my RSS reader. Anytime a page on these domains get dugg, the page in question pops up in my Google Reader along with the link to Digg. This is good also for monitoring any comments that Diggers make.

For those of you who don’t know how to do this, just search for the domain in the Digg search box. You don’t need the “http://” part but you do need the rest. So for this domain, I would put betterthantherapy.net in the search box. Then filter it down to “URL only”. Once you’ve done that, click on the small orange RSS logo to the right of the page.

Congratulations, you’ve just subscribed to the feed. Now whenever a page on that domain gets dugg, you’ll find out immediately. This is also good if you are part of any informal Digg or Stumbleupon networks where you digg or stumble web content sent to you by friends. Just put the domains they mostly digg or stumble into your RSS reader and when they send you the link themselves, you can say to them “hah! too slow!”

Technorati Tags: Digg, RSS, Stumbleupon

I am currently fighting the flu so I am a little behind with posting to the blog. But I just wanted to quickly fill you in on some of the new things that I have added to the blog. A lot of you may be reading my posts only from the RSS reader so I figured I should mention the new stuff to those people who don’t make a habit of visiting the site that often.

Twitter Updates - despite my initial opposition to Twitter and its “Big Brother” image (what are YOU doing right now?), I’ve decided to overcome my reluctance and give it a go. Part of the reason for the change of heart is that I started leaving status messages in my Facebook account and so I guess I have got used to the idea.

I also found that if I posted regular status messages, I would get less emails from people asking where I was and why I was suddenly silent. So starting from today, the front page of the blog will have a small box with a Twitter status message in it. Feel free to add me to your Twitter ID or subscribe to my Twitter feed.

Go to a random page on the blog - I found this plug-in on Wordpress and I thought it was quite a fun idea.    By clicking on this link, you will taken at random to a blog post on this site.    It may be one of the newer posts or one of the older posts but everytime you click on that link, you’ll be taken at random to another post.    I guess it is the same principle as Stumbleupon.     The only snag right now is that the blog is so new that I don’t have so many posts, so you will probably be taken to the same ones over and over.    But there is a box with the link on the front page for when I have built up some more work.

This is an excellent feature for recycling old work and getting fresh sets of eyes on stuff you may have wrote a year or two ago.

Buy me a beer - some people may find this one a bit cheeky but I have put a Paypal payment button on the front page if anyone wants to send me the money for a beer.     Blogging is thirsty work you know!    

Subscribe to the blog by email -  I initially removed this feature when I moved the blog over to this domain.    However, when I signed into my Feedburner account, I noticed I had quite a lot of email subscribers so I quickly put the feature back on the front page.

Subscribe to my Stumbles, Diggs and Del.icio.us links - I set up Feedburner links for my accounts on Stumbleupon, Digg and Del.icio.us.   I bookmark quite a bit on Del.icio.us, a fair bit on Stumbleupon and as yet not so much on Digg (but I am planning to step this up).   If you would like to keep up to speed with what I am stumbling, digging and linking to, subscibing to these feeds would be a good idea.   RSS subscribers are currently getting my Del.icio.us links anyway through another Feedburner service but I plan to switch that off soon.   So if you like getting those links, please sign up to the new Del.icio.us feed.     All links on the front page.

I think that’s it for the moment.

Technorati Tags: Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, feedburner, paypal, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Wordpress

Leading on from my post on Stumbleupon the other day, I found this interesting article about claiming your Stumbleupon blog feed in Technorati, allowing other people to subscribe to it. However, when I tried it, it didn’t work. Technorati wanted me to put a code on the Stumbleupon page and it just didn’t work.

However, saying that, I got the idea to claim my various feeds on Feedburner. As well as the official blog feed, I have now set up Feedburner feeds for my accounts in Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Digg. This will allow anyone who is interested to subscribe to the feeds and see what I am up to.

In time I will add these feeds to the sidebar but I thought I would point out today that Feedburner does accept these feeds and that you can use the Feedburner service to drive people towards your stumbles, your diggs or whatever RSS service you like. There’s no holds barred really. If there’s an orange RSS button on the page, Feedburner can burn it for you.

Plus the best part is that since you can now monetize your Feedburner feeds with Adsense ads, you can now turn your various feeds into generating income for you.

Has anyone else done something like this? I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Technorati Tags: burn, Del.icio.us, delicious, Digg, feed, feedburner, monetize, RSS, Stumbleupon, Technorati

As part of my marketing and promotion strategies for this blog, I am once again taking a big interest in Stumbleupon. My interest in SU flagged earlier this year (as I have a notoriously short attention span) but recently I have been reading up on SU posts on the internet. Reading them has made me realise that I would be silly to completely give up Stumbleupon because it gives a blog something which is much needed - regular traffic.

According to my Google Analytics account, Stumbleupon gives me 26% of my total blog traffic. But what made me stop and think for a minute was that according to Analytics, the average Stumbler only stayed on the site for less than 2 minutes. So that made me wonder - why are people so reluctant to stick around? I read on the net that many Stumblers equate stumbling to surfing TV channels in that they like to flip from page to page really fast. This may be good for monthly page hits but not so good at raising RSS subscriber counts or getting money through advertising.

So it’s really a double-edged sword. On one hand, SU can bring in regular visitors but on the other hand, once the visitors arrive, they don’t stick around long enough, as their minds are already wandering to the stumble button to get to the next page.

A blessing or a curse for bloggers? I’ll let you decide on that one.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Google, marketing, promotion, Stumbleupon