Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

I asked Smozgur to enable the Bookmarks bar in each thread.

Here is the concept: When you find a thread that is particularly interesting to you, then you would choose to add it to your list of bookmarks at Digg, StumbleUpon, or Delicious. These are social bookmarking sites, which means that your list of favorites is viewable to the world.

Digg is the most famous of these sites. If you get 100's of people who all Digg the same site, then it rises in prominence on the Digg home page and it drives boatloads of traffic to the site. So - the most popular sites become even more popular. I never embraced Digg, because I figured that an intuitive solution to an Excel problem could never compete with the number of Diggs that a major tech story would get.

I started reading about and using StumbleUpon this weekend, and it seems fairly cool. I could search for Excel and it would only show me pages that other people had bookmarked about Excel. My first observation...with 6 million people using StumbleUpon, not many people are bookmarking Excel sites. There were maybe a dozen pages tagged with Excel.

So - here is what you can do with those new buttons...
1) One choice is to ignore them. This is the easiest.

2) Another choice. Set up a free account on Digg or StumbleUpon. When you find a particularly interesting thread, click the appropriate icon to add it to your favorites at that service. At StumbleUpon, you asked to choose from a lame list of predefined tags ("Software" seems to be the closest tag for Excel pages). However, later, you can edit your favorites and tag with anything, including Excel.

3) If you already use Digg or StumbleUpon, by all means feel free to give a Digg to interesting threads.

Also...a caveat...StumbleUpon seems to work best when you install their toolbar into your browser. If you hate new toolbars clogging your browser, be forewarned.

If a few people embrace this, then (a) Excel and MrExcel will be better represented at these popular sites. (b) You can also imagine that a certain person's account at StumbleUpon would become a "must-read" list of links. Basically, these public bookmarking sites would allow you to look over your favorite person's shoulder to see which threads they found to be interesting.

Try it out for a week. If someone thinks that they have a unique or cool list of Excel favorites built, stop back here and post a link to your favorites list on Digg or StumbleUpon so we can check out your favorites.

Bill

I've just posted my first - testing it out. Looks good!

Extract numbers from alpha-numeric text string in a cell.

I have quite a big list of favourites so it may take me a while to filter out the REALLY slick ones!

I have started to put my favourites on Digg. The easiest way to look, I found, is to put MrExcel.com in the search box and look in the url. Otherwise "our" Excel entries are simply being swamped.

I'm on there as luxodad, by the way

May I also suggest we put Excel: as the first word in the title. Otherwise we can get a lot of Excellent related irrelevant stuff.

I'm going to have to figure out what my password is for my delicious account now (I used to have it in FireFox, and then I deleted all passowords, temp files and cookies one day). Sigh...

You mean you don't have a Password Manager?? Shame on you.

Sure I do! I just made the mistake of using my memory for that

RichardSchollar said:

Sure I do! I just made the mistake of using my memory for that

Click to expand...

At your age??

Ah, you didn't mention you'd deleted that too...

Great tip... searching Digg for MrExcel.com in URL and All Stories. There were about a dozen there already, some old ones about the free book promotion, but some good favorites.

I can see where this can become an updated consensus list of favorites, unlike my lame attempt at http://www.mrexcel.com/favorites.html , which has not been updated in a year.

Bill

MrExcel said:

2) Another choice. Set up a free account on Digg or StumbleUpon. When you find a particularly interesting thread, click the appropriate icon to add it to your favorites at that service. At StumbleUpon, you asked to choose from a lame list of predefined tags ("Software" seems to be the closest tag for Excel pages). However, later, you can edit your favorites and tag with anything, including Excel.

Click to expand...

I was able to type my own tags in here right away, the predefined ones seem to be "helpers" only.

Just a minor thing, though it might save someone some time. I taged one with Excel and Mr.Excel.com.

Thanks for the Stumble/Digg options Bill, it will help keep track of some great threads!!

Cheeers,

Mark