Looking through our traffic analytics, there’s no denying the sheer amount of traffic that StumbleUpon can bring to a site. But there’s one thing that’s stood out about Stumblers over other sources: their lack of return visits.

StumbleUpon visitors seem to be a lot like those heading out for a pub crawl. They’ll visit a few bars, have a few drinks (posts), maybe talk with friends, and have a good time. But by the end of the night (day), several sites later, they’re stumbling around, probably with little clue as to where they are. The details of the last few bars are hazy; but you’re having a good time.

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You have been bitten by a vampire, so and so’s added some innocuous application that you really could care less about, add this application to spam and alienate the few friends that you have left. This is just a sample of the garbage that now populates the Facebook mini-feed (cynicism aside of course). What was a once a rather gratifying exercise in voyeurism has now turned into a something resembling a flea market escapade. Then there’s the wall which went from elegant simplicity to becoming the equivalent of an elementary school art project and the mini-feed, which is now full of mostly junk interspersed with the occasional treasure of friend related gossip. Read more »

I was just having another look at the now infamous Does What happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook presentation and it got me thinking about online privacy and what a paradox it is. Anything online is easily reproduced and propagated by virtue of the internet being digital and omnipresent in nature. It is therefore a medium which is fundamentally at odds with the idea of privacy because the preservation of privacy requires the existence of informational silos which limit said information from spreading too far.

The idea that the real world concept of these “contextual silos” which prevent information from spreading very far beyond it’s original context could be transferable to the web is flawed because digital information is ubiquitous. Anything on the web can potentially be seen by anyone, anywhere at anytime, whereas in real life a night of say, alcohol fueled revelry, would only be witnessed by people present at the event and would be known to only so many people outside those that were present. Furthermore, the internet is a repository of digital memories as opposed to human memories and so not only is nothing ever Read more »

I remember endless hours of my youth spent playing Monoploy, gleefully bankrupting friends and relatives alike while I had visions of being the next Trump. I always wondered what playing the game would feel like if those colorful pieces of Monoploy money were real instead. Now a new venture out of Montreal called Weblo promises to fulfill my childhood longings.

Weblo is hoping to strike it rich by staking its claim in the cyber gold rush to build and populate virtual worlds and massively multi player online games (MMOG’s). Hoping to cash in on the same trend that has turned Second Life and World of War Craft into the phenomena that they are, Weblo has created a virtual world that is essentially a carbon copy of the real world.

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