StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites online. There’s a good reason for this. It’s hard to classify SU as social bookmarking or social networking because it incorporates elements of both so well. I particularly like SUs toolbar, which gives users a one-click approach to voting for or against a site. If you like the site you just click the thumbs up icon. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down button.
There are some downsides to StumbleUpon though. For instance, if you are the first person to vote on a site and you don’t like it then you can’t add it to the SU community. SU won’t let you. That’s a bummer. But I’ve recently discovered another weakness of the system, although my observation at this point is merely a hypothesis.
If you bookmark an entire blog – that is, the home page – then go back later and try to thumbs up a specific blog post, SU won’t let you. Click on the thumbs up button and you’ll get a gray thumb and no response. I believe this is because you’ve already shown that you like the entire site, therefore saying that you like a particular post is redundant. At least that’s the way SU sees it. For this reason, I recommend only voting for individual blog posts.
I wonder if anyone else has had this experience with StumbleUpon and if so, what did you do about it.
I’ve just had a look on a forum I work for and post on and while I thumbed up the homepage, I can still add individual threads and forums sections.
So maybe it’s just blogs?
That may be so, Daan. Then again, it may be something else. As I said, it’s a hypothesis based on the testimony of someone I know who tried to stumble a particular blog post. I know this person has stumbled the entire blog in question and wrote a review of it. She tried to stumble a particular blog post on that blog and couldn’t. I haven’t tested the hypothesis myself so I don’t know if it’s accurate or not. Further investigation is necessary.