Ghost friends at StumbleUpon.Too bad!

A few weeks ago, Tadeusz Szewczyk stumbled and reviewed one of my posts. Immediately after that, I received a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon users. Such a thing has never happened to me before. When it comes to traffic from social networking sites, BlogCatalog has always been my main supplier of traffic because I have a number of great friends that side. But, as of now, StumbleUpon has overtaken BlogCatalog by far. As a result, these days, I like spending more of my leisure time stumbling than ever before. And every day, I make more and more StumbleUpon friends, some of whom are top stumblers. You can take a look at my StumbleUpon page, if time is on your side. If you have not yet joined StumbleUpon, I encourage you to join and install their tool bar on your PC. Add me as a friend, if you can. Start enjoying the world of social browsing.

Yesterday, I exchanged messages with caile-girl who is a top stumbler. In one of the messages, she told me that she would have loved to add me as her friend but she can’t just because she has reached the StumbleUpon limit of 200. But she went on to say that there are 24 ghost friends (people who were mutual friends who no longer have SU accounts anymore) in her network and she cannot replace them with live friends like me. She further said that this problem has been going on for a very long time such that most stumblers who have been on StumbleUpon for a long time experience it in varying degrees. This is too bad for a dynamic and addictive social browsing platform of StumbleUpon’s caliber. Can someone at StumbleUpon, please, rectify this anomaly now! It is seemingly small things like these that put off members:(. Do not get surprised when some folks start their own StumbleUpon clone. Go and ask Digg! They now have to battle for members with Mixx.

Comments are welcome. Remember that this is a Do-Follow blog. Today, I am traveling to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, for a funeral so I will be outa here. I will only come back on Monday to take a look at your wonderful comments and reply to them. God bless you all :)

A second wave of Google PageRank penalties

Two weeks ago, Google penalized some blogs and websites for selling PageRank. Now, Techcruch reports that there has been a second wave of the crackdown and that many sites have been affected. Andy Beard reports that some of the affected blogs are Digg favorites. I am of the view that Google must reward obedient blogs (those blogs which do not have link farms) as they wage their Jihad against the so-called blog link farms.

I feel for the guys whose blogs and websites have been affected. But I would like to encourage them to continue improving their blogs by writing good stuff other than cursing Google. Such tactics will not help them because Google as the owner of the search engine have the right to make changes according to their liking. If the affected bloggers continue writing good stuff, other bloggers will link to them, their posts will make it big on digg, stumbleupon and other social booking marking sites and the traffic flow and the value of the their blogs will remain in tact.