K-Squared Ramblings

We’ve Been Stumbled Upon

Wow! Songs Not to Play at a Wedding has been one of our more popular posts for a long time, and I’d seen hits start coming in from StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, about a week ago. But that was a trickle. I wasn’t prepared to check my stats at lunch today and see 1,112 visits from StumbleUpon (here’s the review page) since 5pm yesterday (WordPress’ daily stats rotate at midnight GMT), with another 632 the day before. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting Sociable

I finally got around to setting up convenient links to a couple of social bookmarking sites. At first I resisted the idea, figuring regular users probably have bookmarklets or extensions that take care of it. But social networking sites have casual users, too, and posting a few small icons is a subtler form of self-promotion than putting up a giant banner that says, “Hey! Submit this #$!@ story to ____ now!”

I ended up using Sociable, a plugin for WordPress that already knows the right link formats for several dozen such sites.

Of course, since Sociable provides links for so many sites, the obvious question becomes: Which sites do I include? I don’t want to post all 25—that would just be a jumble of icons, hardly usable (never mind aesthetic!)

I settled on five to start with:

• del.icio.us is my online bookmark service of choice. I still manage a lot of bookmarks locally, but this lets me share a set between multiple browsers at home and work.
• Digg seems to be the leading service for actually sharing and discussing links these days.
• Fark wasn’t on my list at first, but then I realized that I make funny/weird posts here all the time. Some of them would fit right in.
• Reddit is new to me, but it popped up a couple of times when I went looking through sites that I read.
• Yahoo MyWeb I mainly added out of name recognition.

What social bookmarking sites (if any) do you use?