First, the history. If you’ve listened to my evangelism regarding Entrecard, you’ve signed up. No doubt, you’ve looked around and perhaps stumbled upon a site called SiteHoppin – View the web like an iPod. When I first found this site, they enabled visitors to quickly browse websites by categories and offered various Entrecard categories that included only websites that were members of the Entrecard network. There were other “Entrecard browers” out there that did similar things, but the feature that set SiteHoppin on my favorites list was the slideshow feature. You set how many seconds you want to view each page for then hit go – the page automatically refreshed after that time to another random website within that same category.

Clearly, the main goal of a service like this is to drop Entrecards on other blogger’s widgets as efficiently as possible to rack up Entrecredits to advertise on more blogs. But I saw a less selfish goal of this as well – expanding my horizons within the blogosphere. Sure I saw a lot of the same websites day after day to drop my card at, but more often than not I found new blog that I could learn from. Whether or not the blog actually interested me, I could learn through their experiences. I’d look at their site designs, how they used links, what widgets or gadgets they used (heck, that’s how I found Entrecard in the first place), and also paid close attention to their coding flaws to pick up some “don’ts” for my mental blog SOP.

The best part about the slideshow feature was that I could set it for a decent time (15 seconds was my average) and just hit GO and let the blogs refresh over my lunch hour as I sat in front of the computer with one hand near the mouse to click on the drop widget and my lunch in the other. Multitasking is a wonderful thing. I could always hit the stop button if there was something that caught my interest enough to read longer than 15 seconds.

Those days, apparently, have come to an end.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the slideshow feature was gone. Boo! It wouldn’t be nearly as efficient for me to continually have to click the TagHop button to refresh to another site every time, but it was better than nothing. After visiting their blog for more information, I’ve come to find that on 5/2 they removed it to assist with the beta testing of their new Firefox toolbar. Just the other day, I realized that from the main SiteHoppin’ page, the browser was still available but ALL the Entrecard categories were gone. I went to their blog for more information and all I found was a post on the 29th that the Entrecard categories were gone during some rebranding efforts they’re undertaking, but not mention as to whether or not they’d be back.

So for now, their efficiency is nil. The aforementioned toolbar is still in private beta testing, so until they’re done with the testing I can’t have the toolbar to increase efficiency and we’re not getting our slideslows back. I can’t even find anywhere to sign up to request an invite. According to their video posted on the 25th, they’re changing the focus to online bookmarking. They describe how the new and improved service will differ from del.icio.us by saying you can hop from one bookmark to another, one tag to another to browse your bookmarks. What the SiteHoppin’ team seems to forget is that StumbleUpon already has that capability, as well as the capability to browse random sites. The only thing they don’t have is an Entrecard category.

So ultimately, unless they bring the Entrecard categories back along with the slideshow feature, they’ll just be another StumbleUpon. And SU works fine all by itself for me.

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Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:

1. Fun.
2. Traffic.

I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.

But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.

That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job

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When I first started this blog back on Blogger last summer, I somehow got the idea that listing my blog in as many directories as possible was the way to go. I don’t think I read this anywhere but I think my theory was that as many links I could get to my website as possible would be good. I eventually amassed a very large collection of directory listings in my sidebar. The 80×15 banner was my attribution of choice, which I displayed proudly like a badge of honor.

When I made the switch over to WordPress, I kept the directory listings for awhile but I realized that I didn’t really see any traffic from any of these directories. Most of my traffic comes from various social networks & direct visitors, as it did then as well.  So I decided the space was too valuable to clutter up with 20+ little directory buttons.  I also felt like the only people benefiting from these buttons and reciprocated links on my blog were the directories – not me.

It’s been a month now that I’ve been on this new home of mine and I’m starting to wonder if I did the right thing.  I wonder if that “every little bit helps” method I had before was correct, and I got too full of myself in thinking that I didn’t need these links anymore.

So what have you found with directories?  If anyone reading has any experience with listing themselves in the many blog directories there are around there on the net I’d love to hear it – please share!

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