Stumbled Upon by StumbleUpon

This morning’s Ad Majorem site data included an extra couple of hundred visits, all reading a book review of The Shallows from last September. The source was StumbleUpon, a personalized aggregator of web content, or as Wikipedia clarifies, “a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users.” I’m now one of those users, and you can follow my stumbling via Twitter or on StumbleUpon itself.

So what did I stumble upon?

A trusted colleague, Michael Leis, describes StumbleUpon as a fantastic and small community, and that it was a fellow “stumbler” who convinced him to try Twitter some years ago. (Read Michael’s “5 things I’ve learned about Social Media, StumbleUpon Style”.)

Notice that I didn’t write “a fantastic but small community”. The magic of social media is not the size of one's network, but its relevance. I’ve selected a few topics of personal interest and am sure I’ll find relevant content from like-minded stumblers.

Automatic for the Tweeple

Several friends on Twitter also use StumbleUpon, so I tweeted them this morning for more insight. Open government advocate John Moore and Social Media strategist Victor Canada both called StumbleUpon “my favorite bookmarking site.”

I still haven’t figured out why a lot of people suddenly stumbled upon my 8-month old post, but I’m glad they did, because I got a new resource out of it.