Nudgeville - My New Project
Yes you may have heard on the grapevine that I’ve been working on something new. This something is a result of me being banned from Digg for using scripts that I thought were legit. No warning, no message, just banned. I was only on for 3 months so no big loss but I will miss the friends I made there. Fortunately I still speak to many on Gtalk. 
So with this extra couple of minutes a day I had free, I decided to create my own mini-Digg site : Nudgeville. It works very similar to Digg; submit stories, promote it and make friends. The difference between the two, will be, Nudgeville will have a friendly environment. Through moderation and communication it’s my goal to make this a site where people can share stories and comment without getting their heads bitten off.
Please check it out if you haven’t.
I’ll be running a competition in the next couple of days to get the word out so keep an eye on the Nudgeville Blog.
I am an open-minded guy so if you have any feedback in how I can improve the site, please let me know.
See you in Nudgeville!
Popularity: 19% [?]
My Daily “Must-Visit” Web Site List
Now that I’ve officially entered into the foray of social media applications, I’ve noticed that I’m spending more and more time on the Internet. Recognizing the additional time consumption, I am determined to make sure that things do not get out of hand.
To do this, I need to list down all the sites that I visit on a daily basis and then prioritize the maximum time I should spend on each. I’ll address the latter in a future post.
Here’s my list:
My Daily “Must-Visit” Web Site List:
1. Alexa: Traffic Rankings for my 3 blogs
2. Google Adsense: Advertising revenue - it’s nice to see how these figures update almost real-time.
3. My Blogs: Mr.Gadget Australia, Arnold Aranez dot com and Gadget Loop (new site)
4. Kontera: Another advertising revenue website
5. Affiliate Websites: Clickbank
6. Plurk: Social media website that acts as a micro-blog with graphical timeline
7. Twitter: Micro-blog which I post a couple of announcements per day
8. Stumble Upon: Social bookmarking tool
9. Digg: Social bookmarking app
10. Google Gmail: Check in to read and reply to mail a couple of times a day
11. Technorati: occasionally pop-in to see how my Technorati rank is progressing
12. Facebook: Social media app to keep in touch with friends and family
Now that I’ve identified the top websites that I visit daily, I now need to time-manage each to make my day more streamlined / effective. Would love to hear of any tools or techniques that other people use.
How many sites are your “Must-Visit” website list?
Popularity: 30% [?]
7 Tips to Improve Your Stumble Upon Experience
2008 has been the year that I have delved more into online social media apps. The two main reasons for this was curiosity and to connect with like-minded ‘internetty’ type people. I currently dabble with 5-6 Social Media apps daily - one of these is Stumble Upon.
What is Stumble Upon?
Stumble Upon is a social bookmarking online site that allows you to share websites with friends using the Stumble Upon browser toolbar. If you like a website you’re looking at, simply press the “Thumbs Up” button; if you don’t like it, “Thumbs Down”. If it’s exceptional or you’d like to add your opinion on the site for others to see, press the review button to leave a comment.
The name “Stumble Upon” is derived from the ability to Stumble through websites that are filtered via keywords/tags/categories that you have selected. For example, some of the categories that I have opted-in for are technology, science, internet and photography. So when I press the Stumble! button, it will show me websites that other people have bookmarked that are in these categories.
For me, this is more efficient than finding a website, then having to copy and paste into an email - with Stumble Upon I can do this all within a browser. It also provides the extra advantage of keeping a history of your favorite sites and sites that you liked.
The Benefits of Stumble Upon
I must say that the Stumble Upon experience has been very rewarding; I’ve connected up with similar minded people and discovered some amazing websites. It’s also given me an avenue to promote my own blogs a little too.
My Stumble Upon Statistics @ Aug 2008
Even though I signed up last year, I’ve only been actively using Stumble Upon for 3 months. My current stats of today are:
- Likes 1,920 pages
- Likes 94 videos
- Likes 136 photos
- Has 158 fans
- Received 40 reviews
The tally above is evidence that once you’ve started Stumbling it hard to stop! 
7 Tips for New Stumble Upon Users / Stumblers
I’ve asked a couple of my good Stumble friends to help me compile a list of tips for newbies. This list was created to make your Stumble Upon experience as rewarding and effective as possible from the onset.
1. Don’t spam others with your own website content: this advice was consistent amongst all my friends - nobody likes spam of any sort, regardless of how good it is. Keep promotion of your own site to at max 1 per day. Even this may cause others to block you so be careful.
Popularity: 100% [?]
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