StumbleUpon - seeing democratisation in action

The traffic to this blog bumps along around 100-200 hits a day. Occasionally it goes up if someone like Stephen Downes links to me, and it goes down if I don't post for a while, for example over the summer holidays. Overall though, it's pretty constant (as an aside, I have the vague feeling that mentioning your traffic figures is a bit of a social faux pas, rather like stating your salary).

Then on Sunday I had a massive spike of nearly 700. But it only lasted one day, on Monday it was back to normal. This is higher than I've had even when David Weinberger linked to me, but then his effect lasted over several days.

The cause of this spike was that two people had reviewed my post on 'My personal working/learning/leisure environment.' One of these Julia Lesage, an academic in Oregon. She is a big stumbler obviously, and her effect was considerable. I find this interesting because of all the talk of the democratisation of power, you need real examples to bring it home. For all the marketing you might want to do, the formal reviews you might want to commission, the real power lies with a silver haired lady in Oregon...   

Comments

[AJ Cann]

I've had exactly the same experience over at http://microbiologybytes.wordpress.com/ where one person stumbled on post and it has had a huge effect on traffic over several months now.

[stuart]

get the stumbleupon browser extension installed. I've been stumbling for a couple of years now and have come across countless interesting / amusing sites.
stumbleupon is now owned by ebay - http://mashable.com/2007/05/30/stumbleupon-ebay-integration-begins-screenshots/

[Grainne Conole]

Yep i know what you mean Martin. The fact that George Siemens linked to me soon after I started blogging had a huge impact and funnily enough the largest group of readers of my blog are from the states - i am sure the two things are connected. Dunno about the social faux pas thing, but Tony Hirst has mentioned his daily hits so it must be ok ;-)

Grainne

[Tony Hirst]

Out of interest, what do you use to capture stats, Martin?

[Martin]

Only feedburner and the built-in stats that comes with Typepad (I'm a paying customer you know). Interestingly the two never quite tally.