Stumble Cards: A Growing Pandemic

Welcome fellow Stumblers. I'm sure most of you are well aware of this latest sensation to sweep the web. What started out as an ill conceived viral marketing campaign, by the web design firm uP'n'@tom, has quickly morphed into an all out spam attack on the StumbleUpon Community.

The problem with uP'n'@tom's stumble cards is that they lack creativity and are extremely easy to duplicate. Spammers have quickly made their own stumble cards to drive traffic to their sites serving advertising. This is degrading the user experience of StumbleUpon. Another problem is that ad-driven blogs, like Cult Press, are jumping on board and posting collections of stumble cards to drive stumble traffic to their blog posts that are loaded with ads.

The biggest problem fueling the stumble card pandemic is the collection of stumblers who thumb up the cards. If the majority of StumbleUpon users, who dislike the cards, can get the word out that these cards are nothing more than spam, then maybe fewer and fewer people will thumb them up. Over time these spammers will see less and less traffic coming to their stumble card pages and it will not be worth their time to create new ones. As long as people keep thumbing up the cards, the more of them we will see on StumbleUpon.

So my question to the StumbleUpon community is this: what do you think the SU community should do to address this problem?

Stumble It!

I like it!

Welcome fellow Stumblers! Stumbleupon is essentially a toolbar plug-in for your web browser that allows you to channel surf the web according to your preferences. Stumbleupon is easy to use and provides for a completely different internet browsing experience. It also can be very fun and addictive.

How it works:

After creating an account and downloading the toolbar, hit the Stumble! button. You will automatically navigate to a webpage from Stumbleupon's index of pages. These pages have been "liked" and tagged by users. New pages are added when users press the thumbs up on the toolbar.

Users associate the pages they like with relevant keywords or tags. The pages you see will depend on your interests (provided to stumbleupon at signup). You can also stumble through" specific categories, search queries, or web sites.

Try it on your pages:

We uploaded the first pages to seokomodo.com on Friday, November 9th and received a little under 300 unique visitors from close to 20 countries in less than two days. It's fun having even a little traffic with a new domain, right? Stumbleupon can get pages in front of people quickly. Although these visitors are somewhat relevant because of tags, stumbling is still the closest thing to real internet surfing out there. Stumblers are always moving so don't cry when they only stay on the page for a short while.

Stumble It!