Nick Wilsdon» Social Media

Using Network Features On Sphinn

Nick Wilsdon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:55:05 +0000

In this post, I wanted to show you one of the useful additions to the new Sphinn platform; networking. This feature lets you filter the articles on the site to submitters you trust and want to follow.

Underneath each submission there is an add button, as you see below. Click this to add this person to your network.

Then turn network filtering on, using the option at the top of the ‘Hot or Not’ or front page.

You then have your news filtered according to the submitters you want to follow. Less noise, more signal. You can also see this view of the site by default in the My Network tab. Here you can see who is in your network and who has placed you in their network (i.e. following you).

Here are 20 top-quality submitters from my network that you may want to follow. You can also do this from the link on their profiles.

Free free to add me to your network also (Nick Wilsdon)

If you’re submitting great material on Sphinn, please add a link to your profile in the comments below. I’m always on the look out for quality submitters to follow, especially outside the usual circles.

It may help you too. Getting yourself onto the network of regular Sphinn members raises your visibility within the platform. It shouldn’t guarantee votes but it will get your submissions read by more users.

Twitter Debutes In Dilbert

Nick Wilsdon — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:31:54 +0000

AFAIK this is a first time Twitter has appeared in the world of Dilbert. Goes to show how far the service is progressing into the mainstream. A recent report by eMarketer suggests that Twitter user numbers could exceed 26m in the US alone. Global estimates have been put at 35-45m current users. Even with the hype, the platform has gone from a niche social site to a global player.

Coming back down to earth though, Dilbert is probably closer to the reality for most bosses who jump on the Twitter bandwagon. If you’re not already getting Scott Adam’s masterpiece through your email each morning, then sign up here.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

12 Defensive Steps To Secure Your Sites & Income

Nick Wilsdon — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:46:11 +0000

It’s easy to avoid disasters with hindsight and hopefully 10yrs as a domain registrar, web producer and marketer has given me some. In my opinion, here are 12 defensive steps which you should take right now.

1. Ensure Your Domains Have Accurate WHOIS records

Sounds simple but you wouldn’t believe how many domain registrations have been made using the wrong details. Too often the domain vendor would slip their own details into the owner or administrative details. The person who dealt with the “internet” would register company domains with their personal email then move onto a new job a few months later.

Incorrect records can cause a nightmare when you come to update or transfer the domain in the future. The owner/admin email holder can transfer the domain away.

Ensure that your details and email are on the administrative and owner contact fields of the domain. Running a WHOIS check will help but the contact email addresses can only be seen through the private panels of your domain provider.

2. Make Sure You Own Your Domains Legally

It may come as a surprise but WHOIS records are not proof of domain name ownership. Make sure you have access to the account with the domain registrar and have printed off invoice receipts for your registration.

3. Setup Your Own Domain Expiry Reminders

Don’t put all your trust in your domain provider. They may drop the ball or fail to contact you for the renewal. Registries have little sympathy once you have lost your domain, nor does the domain speculator who snapped it up.

Setup expiry reminders on your chosen calender application, use a birthday reminder service like HipCal or a dedicated domain tool like URLPad. Make sure you have reminders on 2 different email accounts, in case one fails.

4. Backup Your Sites – Regularly!

Again many rely 100% on their hosts for this. For WordPress sites you can backup the whole blog or just the database on regular periods and send it to a newly created Gmail account. Cpanel, Plesk and other control panel systems usually provide backup facilities for your whole site – use them. Software like SyncBackSE (Windows) or Filezilla (Windows, Mac and Linux) will help you maintain a synchronized copy of your files on your local computer.

Make sure you keep a few copies of your backup. An external Icy Box and a few old hard disks is an effective & low cost solution.

5. Invest In Decent DNS

Too many low grade hosts have their name servers placed on the same box as their hosted sites. If the server goes down, so do the name servers which can result in many hours of downtime, even after the server itself has come back online. That downtime is expensive for your business.

For a small fee you can buy a high quality DNS service or you may find the DNS at your registrar is sufficient. These name servers should update very fast across the internet, be backed up and have a fallover system.

This move will give your sites some security against long periods of downtime. In situations where your host has failed completely you can also switch the traffic to another provider.

6. Own Your RSS Feeds

Service at Feedburner has been rocky in recent months. Alternative services such as FeedBlitz and PostRank are waiting in the wings. Other services may come in the future. The lesson here is to make sure your RSS feed is delivered on a URL you control. That will let you change providers without loosing valuable subscribers.

Make sure you use a service which lets you create a CNAME record to point their branded URL towards your domain. Both FeedBurner and FeedBlitz allow you to use your own domain name.

7. Buy Your Vanity and Brand Domains

It makes sense to grab the COM/ORG/INFO/NET versions of your company domain name and any key brands you have developed. If you have plans internationally then also grab these extensions in your target countries. Domain registration fees are nothing compared to the legal fees you run up reclaiming these.

On a personal level, register your name domain (firstname+surname.com). Keyword domains have a natural advantage in ranking for these terms – ensure they are under your control.

8. Start Filling Your Vanity or Brand Results

Defend against online reputation attacks by filling these SERPs with your own entries. These results will defend you against low level ORM attacks and targeted link building can make them even more powerful.

Finding good sites for this is not hard, look for authority sites where you can place your profile. Here’s a couple of good site lists to start your efforts.

9. Control Your Short URLs

The recent death of the Zi.ma service was a wake up call for everyone using a shortening URLs service. If the service fails, then all those links fail, leaving you with no way to redirect that lost traffic. If you using short links in link building efforts or for affiliate marketing then you need to roll your own solution.

These are many URL shortening scripts on the market, for a small fee GentleSource ($29), PlusPHP Short URL Script ($59) or for free, e.g. Shorty

10. Use Your Own Domains For Email

Defensible email means using your own domain rather than a branded service. If you use Gmail then use your own domain name with them or sign up to Google Apps. Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Live Mail also offer services using your own domain.

Like your RSS feeds, this approach would allow you to switch providers without loosing your email address.

11. Keep Your Content On Your Own Domains

Always build content on your own domains, otherwise you’re at the mercy of the service provider. They may offer to export your data but that often means loosing links, traffic and historical trust that you’ve built up over the years.

So roll your own blog installation rather than using a hosted blog solution like WordPress.com or Blogger. Also keep it in mind when using third party sites like Squidoo, Google Knol or Twitter. These sites are useful but never forget that this material is most strongly defended on your own domains.

12. Set Up Malware Alerts

If Google, Firefox or IE flags your site as containing malware they will stop their users viewing your site. This can be as devastating as a hosting failure. The sooner you know about this the better.

Make sure you get early alerts on Google’s blacklist from Google Webmaster Center or SerpGuard.com. You can also set up Google Alerts for known malware keywords, as detailed here by Patrick Altoft.

** Hurricane Ike Prep by Cayobo one of the artists who make their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

WhosTalkin: New Social Search Tool Launched

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:57:28 +0000

WhosTalkin is a new search engine for the social media landscape. It searches across 40+ popular social media applications, providing in depth results not usually seen in the mainstream search engines. In their own words:

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

Joe Hall asked me to beta test the system and aside from a few minor issues my first impressions are very positive.

The Interface and Controls

Top marks for making this simple and intuitive. Steve Krug would approve. My first choices are limited to a single search box, which gathers results from all their sources.

You can then drill down results by each source, listed on the left. These range from Twitter, Technorati to Bloglines and YouTube. Simple enough. My only complaint here would be the need to operate two scrollbars, one for the menu and another for the results. Even with the site at full screen, the design is limited by a fixed height. It would be good if scrolling could be limited to one controller only.

The Results

A quick vanity search on “Nick Wilsdon” produced 210 results. Although I monitor this search in Google Alerts, there were several new results for me here. To be fair to Google Alerts, my free account only returns results to a certain depth.

WhosTalkin should have an advantage over GoogleAlerts by querying the sites direct, but this advantage will depend entirely on the quality of each API. If they manage to provide a more comprehensive picture without charging, it will do very well. Clearly this could become another useful tool for ORM monitoring.

Other Features

The WhosTalkin team are considering or already working on a range of paid subscription services to compliment the free system. On their list are plugins for WordPress, iGoogle and Firefox. The must-have function for me is RSS feeds for selected searches.

With a hat tip towards my industry collegue Brian Carter, adding feeds from WhosTalkin.com and Google Alerts into your iGoogle desktop would make an excellent D.I.Y. monitoring tool.

Overall this is an excellent mash-up and will prove useful to anyone monitoring their online reputation. There’s still room in the market for ORM search engines, provided they return better results than their competitors. WhosTalkin.com seems to be succeeding on this point.

You can follow the progress of WhosTalkin on their blog. They don’t have a launch date at the moment, beyond “very soon” but Joe is open to beta test requests on the system.

Technorati Tags: ORM, Reputation Management, Search Engines, Social Search, WhosTalkin

Twitter Define Rules on Spam and Commercial Usage

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:22:15 +0000

Twitter has released their most detailed guidelines yet on what they consider spam within their system. Commercial users take note. Although they emphasise that commercial or promotional use of Twitter is allowed the following activities may be considered spam and result in account suspension.

1. Following other accounts in order to gain attention to your account or links

2. Creating a series of accounts in order to promote the same thing

3. Sending large numbers of @reply messages that are not genuine replies

4. Creating updates in order to show up in search results

5. Disguising links (i.e. writing about one thing but linking to another)

6. If a large number of users have blocked you (relative to those following you)

These guidelines are in addition to their standard TOS clauses.

I don’t think these will impact too many ‘real’ users but there maybe some implications. Point 3 would seem to kill off any automated response scripts for example. Some of these new guidelines do seem a little vague from my perspective, for example #4 would seem hard to prove and most Twitter users have probably been guilty of #1 at some time. What do you think?

Considering that people/companies invest a large amount of time and therefore cost into establishing their Twitter accounts, you would hope the moderators apply these rules with account history and context in mind.

Update 01.09.08: Is this the End of Keyword Marketing on Twitter?

A tweet by Scottclark just got me thinking that #3 maybe the one to watch here. This guideline could potentially apply to keyword marketing on Twitter. Companies have caught onto using Twitter as a source of potential customers, with operators using free tools such as search.twitter.com or http://tweetbeep.com/ to alert them when certain keywords are mentioned. They then @reply the user with their marketing message or offer of support.

For example, you mention you are looking for an image and a certain image search engine will send you a note. Or less helpfully, as Scott points out, there are now Indian outsourcing companies jumping on mentions of programming languages.

You also have companies replying ORM style to mentions of their name or products. If you comment about Firefox you can expect a fairly instant response from their support team.

This adds a new dimension to the earlier comments in the Twitter announcement about companies creating “opt-in relationships”. Where do they draw the line here?

Hat tip Paul Silver

Technorati Tags: Microblogging, Twitter

Jaiku Moves To Google Servers: Open To All

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:51:59 +0000

Jaiku have finally completed their much anticipated move to the Google App Engine. They have also moved the platform out of its closed status and given existing users an unlimited number of invitations. This email was sent out a few minutes ago:

We’ve been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after
finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the
solution, we’re moving Jaiku to a Google data center.

This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our
future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we’ve moved, we’ll
need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and
privacy policy.

As a special thank you for your patience, we’d like to throw a
little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

Twitter must be feeling rather nervous right now. The Google App Engine promises to solve the infrastructure promises to solve the problems of reliability that have plagued Twitter over recent months. As Google themselves say, “Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches”. This will be a very public demonstration of that statement and the validity of the platform.

There have also been suggestions that Python, the language used in the Google Engine will be a better choice for this kind of application. Most agree it is is faster than Ruby on Rails (RoR). However RoR fans point the finger at the framework behind the project, a key advantage Google holds over Twitter.

It’s likely there will be a migration to Jaiku, even just to check out the relaunch so ensure you have your branding/username secured. If you need an invite, then leave a comment below. As @seocopyandstrat just tweeted to me:

I wonder if we’ll all migrate to Jaiku next time the Fail Whale appears, and then stay there?

Technorati Tags: Google, Jaiku, Twitter

SocialMedian Review: First Impressions Of The Next Big Thing

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:10:01 +0000

What is SocialMedian.com?

From Mashable.com:

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) – or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources.

So SocialMedian has got a bit of everything in there; social submission, voting, news aggregation, sharing and groups. I’d also mention that it delivers a handy email summary of articles every few hours or daily. KillerStartup suggested these notifications would be via Twitter but they either got this wrong or this feature will be coming in the future. I hope it’s the latter. On the face of it this mashup is doing nothing new but the way they have combined the features works.

Who’s Using SocialMedian.com?

SocialMedian.com was launched publicly on the 31st July but already reports 5537 users. More importantly, the site has attracted some well known early adopters, such as Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. The owner Jason Goldberg is also very active on the site and doing a heroic job at drumming up the activity. To start you off, here’s a list of 25 SEO/SEMs on the system. Feel free to add your SocialMedian URL in the comments.

SocialMedian themselves encourage new sign-ups to follow the most active users on the site, so early adopters can use this to their advantage in building their network.

Articles are delivered via newsgroups. These are some of the most active SEO/SEM and Social Media groups I found with user numbers in brackets. Follow the links to sign-up.

http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo (79)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/search-engine-marketing (60)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo-2-0 (39 – well done Tad!)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-networking (859)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-media-watch (909)

Enough Good, What About the Ugly?

I’ve experienced some strange activity on the site. Once where a news item was sent to the wrong newsgroup and another time where I was unable to edit a comment. Also SocialMedian.com is having some obvious issues with the current load, this reduces the site to a crawl at times and is probably the underlying cause for these other issues. More than once I’ve been left staring at the default Ruby on Rails error page. Hopefully the fact they have not chosen to customise this with a Fail Whale indicates this problem to be temporary.

Another issue which bugs me is connected to the sharing story functions. If you choose to tweet or email links from SocialMedian, the recipient is required to sign-up to follow the link to the source story. This is true for any non-members casually browsing the site. As Paul Silver twittered back to me, “that smacks of link hoarding/user grabbing”. I think he’s right. I won’t be using that function again to send links to my Twitter feed.*

On the subject of nofollow, the site is sea of pink using the Search Status Plugin for FireFox. However links to the source article are left followed. With so much nofollow plastered about I’m not sure how much linkjuice will flow down to the article pages but hopefully this is a show of respect to the original content producers rather than an oversight.

Conclusion – Should I Sign Up?

I was impressed with the site. As I wrote before, it brings something new to the table in an already overpopulated niche. I really like the level of maturity and number of professionals in this community. These are articles on venture capital rather than LOLcats or iPod rave reviews (although there is already an Apple group). I haven’t read their policy on submitting your own material but the audience looks receptive to commercial sites or marketing related posts.

SocialMedian also encourages you to explore topics through their grouping system. After you read an interesting article you can subscribe to that group feed. It maybe the early adopters but I found myself reading posts on marketing, investment and blogging that wouldn’t be in my usual news sources.

While SEO/SEM/Marketing communities are always going to be my passion, I enjoyed the way SocialMedian pushed me in other directions. With all the banal blogging recently this was a breath of fresh air and an exciting opportunity to meet people outside my immediate SEO/SEM circles.

In my opinion, SocialMedian is a serious contender.

Update: Jason has just twittered me to say they are working on removing the signup requirements. He’s also acknowledged the speed issue. Thanks Jason. You can follow the SocialMedian twitter account here.

Technorati Tags: Beta Launches, Jason Goldberg, News Aggregators, Social Media, SocialMedian, SocialMedian.com, Twitter

Do You Want Some Followed Links From Twitter?

Nick Wilsdon — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:41:12 +0000

Here’s a quick link opportunity I’ll share with you. Quite a few people have pondered about getting links from the uber-popular Twitter. I had much the same thoughts as NickyCakes when I first saw that the only followed links in the service pointed to the posting applications.

Strangely enough there is a much easier link opportunity on the system. Although Twitter has carefully applied nofollow to your Web entry in the your profile, you can slip a handful of URLs into the Bio fields (see here). The key is putting “www” in front of each one and a comma between entries, i.e. www.domain1.com, www.domain2.com

For some reason that converts the URL into a link. My guess is that Twitter forgot to remove some RoR formatting on this input field. This is almost the same behavior you see in tweets when you enter a web address.

Although profile pages have no TBPR (marked unranked) by default, some have built up a visible score and all are indexed by the search engines. I’ve not tested the link juice but considering that 90% of the page content is nofollowed it looks tasty. So get your signature links in there while it lasts.

03/09/08 Update: Twitter Makes Bio Link Non-Active

Well we knew this day would come. Especially after DaveN blogged about the technique and caught Google Engineer Matt Cutt’s attention. He sent a message to @ev (Evan Williams, a twitter founder) to alert him and a few weeks on, the links have been made non-active. Don’t blame Dave though. First, he’s a great guy and second – if your SEO success depends on loopholes in Web 2.0 apps you have bigger problems than Twitter altering their code.

Still, this saga has created a new controversy of its own. SEOs are wondering what right Google has to intervene in other websites and their ever evolving application of nofollow. The tag was first introduced to control spam within UGC, such as user comments but that initiative was soon declared a failure. However Google has increasingly pressured webmasters to use the tag on any link that might affect their results. To keep following the story as it develops, follow the posts by Rae Hoffman or Kevin Gibbons, or these two Sphinn posts.

3 Advanced Tips to Optimise Your Blog Feeds

Nick Wilsdon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:50:56 +0000

As my regular readers know, we recently launched an RSS aggregator called SocialBlogroll.com. The project went very well and it’s now happily churning through 1500+ news feeds from the online marketing community. Viewing all those feeds and blogs made me realise that more than a few people out there aren’t aware of the following tips. If you’re doing all these perfectly then give yourself an A+ and move along.

1. Make Your Feed Links More Visible

OK, hardly a new point but have we really taken it in? Apparently not. During the testing of SocialBlogroll we often struggled to find the RSS feed for some blogs. For most users, that means not signing up and walking away. Make the icons larger and stick links at the foot on every post. After all, when is a user most likely to think about subscribing? You got it.

Worse offenders were blogspot and forum owners. This is quite surprising as vBulletin, the software behind most of the forums, already provides RSS support. You can find this feed link by viewing the code and doing a search for ‘RSS’. It’s in the head of the web document, before the closing </head> tag. Someone tell v7n, WickedFire and IHelpYou for a start. Even your most dedicated user isn’t going to start hunting through source code for an RSS link!

It’s also a good idea to add an alternative email subscription link. Everyone understands email and even in technical niches, we have picked up a number of extra subscribers by adding this feature. Setting email subscriptions up is easy if you already use the FeedBurner service. Go to the Publicize section of the feed settings and you can find the code to insert on your pages. This gives you email subscriber statistics and conveniently leaves FeedBurner to deal with delivery and spam issues.

2. Make Use of RSS Auto-Discovery

As I previously mentioned, there’s a method of linking your RSS feed in the head section of a web document. You’ve probably seen this technique used to link external style sheets. Here’s the code you need if you have a standard RSS 2.0. feed (most of you):

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://your-rss-feed-address" />

Jeremy Zawodny was writing about this back in 2003 but the concept hasn’t really been taken on board. Many online applications and services, like SocialBlogroll are programmed to search for this link when collecting your RSS feed.

All the search engines use auto-discovery to indicate if the page you are visiting has an RSS feed available. If you are reading this in a browser, check the top right corner of the address bar. Netvibes or other RSS readers search for this link by default. Auto-Discovery is catching on, especially in automated Web 2.0 mashups and applications.

Let’s take Matt Cutts blog as an example. He’s installed WordPress into a directory on his domain (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). Although this RSS discovery link appears in the blog section, there is no copy of this link on the main index page of the domain. This means people who enter his well branded and memorable domain name into their RSS reader, will receive an error (seen below).

They need to specifically add the exact RSS feed address or http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. This doesn’t take advantage of the auto-discovery system or the branding Matt has built up for his domain. If he had linked the RSS on his index page, this user would have successfully subscribed to his blog.

Add your RSS discovery link across all your site pages, not just your blog sections. This will allow your feed to get picked up by more services, give your feed option greater visibility and make life easy for potential readers who can’t remember your exact feed address.

3. Consolidate your RSS feed addresses

Now you understand about auto-discovery you may also have realised there is a glaring hole in your plan to track your RSS subscriptions. Although you carefully placed the FeedReader or tracking code onto your pages, did you also change the auto-discovery link? Even if you did change this, could copies of your old link have been cached in the past by other users and web services?

To solve this, consolidate or redirect all your feeds to one URL. If you are using WordPress, then the easiest method is to install the FeedSmith plugin. This lets you enter the FeedBurner or other tracking URL into the admin section and all variations of your feed URL will be redirected here.

However if you want more control or are using another platform, set up 301 redirects yourself. Create or open up your .htaccess file, in the root of your site and copy in the following:

# BEGIN Consolidate Feeds Redirect 301 /wp-rss.php http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php Redirect 301 /wp-rdf.php http://www.mydomain.com /wp-rss2.php Redirect 301 /wp-atom.php http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php Redirect 301 /feed http://www.mydomain.com/wp-rss2.php Redirect 301 /wp-rss2.php http://your-feedburner-url/ # END Consolidate Feeds

As you see, we redirect all the main feed variations (in this case WordPress) to our wp-rss2.php page. On the last line we redirect this to our tracking URL. If we ever want to change this tracking URL, you simply replace the one line at the end.

Of course, consolidating your feeds can result in a nice jump in subscriber numbers. Let me know how it goes in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Tips, Feeds, FeedSmith, RSS, Tips, WordPress

Interview With StumbleCards Creator, Adam Atom

Nick Wilsdon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:25:19 +0000

This week I’ve been spending a lot of time covering the first StumbleUpon viral, as the story broke and from the perspective of an internet marketer. For my last post on the subject it seemed fair to interview the person who created StumbleCards, Adam and get his point of view. Why did he do it, what for and how does he answer his critics?

Hi Adam. Lots of people have called StumbleCards spam. While recent copycats have been adding Adsense or links to their sites, your intentions were less obvious. Why did you create StumbleCards?

I was reading about an online viral campaign that involved solving a mystery. People were given clues to work out, some very abstract and random. Yet the buzz it generated, inspired people to interact with the viral and pushed them to solve the mystery. I felt inspired by this communal, online type of event and thought maybe I could create my own. Being a seasoned Stumbler I thought, wow I would love to stumble onto something like this, a mystery to work out or a puzzle to solve.

As for the content, I’ve always liked collecting trading cards, zines etc. and thought why not create a digital set of cards that people could collect and trade online. Some I would make easy to find and others I would bury deep in the web.

It’s fair to say that no one invents a viral. Sometimes ideas just catch on and spread. When you were making the first StumbleCards though, did you expect this to explode?

I did think I was onto something new in StumbleUpon. However I thought that Stumblers who were into collecting and solving puzzles might be in the minority for that audience. So no, I didn’t anticipate the way the cards took off.

Since you launched the concept, lots of copycats have appeared and flooded the SU system. I’ve read some reviews that are less than flattering about the person who invented this meme. Do you have anything to say to them?

I thought there was a chance people would copy the idea; I just didn’t think they would do such a blatantly bad job of it. My only gripe with the copycats is that they are most likely creating these ugly and even offensive versions intentionally, as a means of killing off the meme or gaming StumbleUpon. The original spirit of the idea is now lost, with most people calling it spam. This was never my intention!

Many of the early reviews to your StumbleCards were positive. What do you attribute that too, the quality of the artwork, the fact the meme was new or other factors?

Maybe it was the quality of the design or the new idea, as these were the first cards to hit the web. The reviews started to turn negative when the copycats came along. The fact of the matter is the original cards are being stumbled less because I have deliberately made them harder to find.

Most people’s experiences of StumbleCards have been through the copycat versions whose sole aim is to upset the StumbleUpon community by spreading their versions as quickly as possible.

People seem to be attributing this meme to SEOs or online marketers but from my own investigations, you come from an artistic or web design background. In fact your website doesn’t offer any marketing services at all. Do you find it strange that the first StumbleUpon viral came from a non-marketer?

I don’t think it’s strange at all. I’m a web designer so it’s important that I have at least a basic understanding of viral marketing. However, my intentions were always coming from a desire to inspire, entertain and engage Stumblers in the hope they might participate. I don’t have anything to sell or advertise, only the idea itself.

When the meme first started there was a definite sense of excitement for some users, who were confused by this viral and keen to see where it was going. Since then, a backlash has developed as the fakes overtook the system, and the meme seemed little else than a way to game the StumbleUpon system. So tell us now, is this going somewhere?

I have created a set of 25 original uP’n’@tOm StumbleCards. My hope is that for those Stumblers who are genuinely interested in collecting the set, will ignore the fakes and go on to find the original 25. To those Stumblers that would like to participate, not all the cards will be easy to find, but isn’t that what collecting is all about? No one wants it to be too easy… it kind of spoils the fun.

As to where they are going, I can’t say too much right now. Unfortunately there may be more fakes, there isn’t much I can do about that. But I know there are people out there who would like to participate and will go searching for the cards nonetheless. Maybe it’s because they have a keen sense of adventure and would like to solve a mystery, just like me.

Thanks Adam and good luck with the game.

Technorati Tags: stumblecard, stumblecards, stumbleupon, viral, viral-marketing