TechnoCloud

I often show social discovery wonder StumbleUpon in presentations to demonstrate the alternative forms of site discovery emerging on the web. To this point, I’ve just been an interested observer and occasional Stumbler.

No longer. Some influential soul discovered TechnoCloud and gave it the thumbs up to recommend it to other users. Cue a relative flood of traffic to the site.

Having enjoyed some brief spurts of traffic via Digg and Reddit in the past, the Stumblers seem a slightly different breed. Rather than the crash and burn mentality of leaving at the first click, Stumblers stayed longer and actually read some additional pages to see just why some of their fellow Stumblers thought it worthy of a thumbs up.

(It should be pointed out that this is partly due to a thumbs up for the homepage rather than a specific page, but I think the point still stands.)

See the record day in the chart below and happy Stumbling!

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Like Elvis, Bob Dylan seems to have no limit to the number of Greatest Hits variations he can release. I can remember as a child listening to my parent’s Dylan compilation in the car some 20+ years ago and the old master is at it again with a single CD or ‘deluxe’ version with 3 CD Digipack no less.

Passing over the fact that most of the old favourites are there yet again, a piece of viral marketing for the album caught my eye.

The viral, also available as a Facebook application, allows you to create your own version of the famous ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video where Dylan nonchalantly holds up lyric cards. In a neat piece of creative you can add your own lyrics to the cards and watch Dylan flick through them followed by a plug for the album.

You can share it via Facebook, email the website version to a friend (with the classic subject line ‘Bob Dylan has a message for you’ or embed it on your blog or social network after the slightly annoying step of having to provide a url and email address.

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Having experimented with several feed readers over the years, I’ve finally settled on Google Reader. The shortcuts, clean design and viewing options meet the majority of my needs. However, there were two major sources of annoyance - number of posts display and no search.

Quite why a search company like Google wouldn’t include the ability to search your feeds as feature no. 1 was as baffling as it was ironic. Finally this has been addressed (but no explanation as to why it took so long) with a simple and effective search field at the top. Job done.

Another source of frustration was with the number of posts display. Once it got to over 100 on an individual feed or on all items, it simply said 100+. So after more than a few days away, half an hour’s feed reading through the likes of Mashable and Techmeme refused to make a dent leaving me wondering just how long I should persevere. A source of stress when you don’t want to miss any nuggets, but do have a finite time to do research.

This has also finally been addressed ramping it up to 1000+ leaving it perfectly clear just how many posts I need to plough through to catch up. Perhaps ignorance was bliss after all…

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