Today I finaly decided to give it a try after reading an article about the creator and how SU was made. StumbleUpon is a website/tool to allow you to explore websites that other people have tagged for you. It is quite a nifty little idea which allows you to randomly access web pages of your preference.

My first thought of the website when I first saw it was that it was a bit too plain and was not really focusing on some content. But later on I realised that the content was in its toolbar for firefox.

All that I had to do was to click Stumble! and I was ready to explore. After a while you pretty much get the same webpages but that doesn’t really stop you there. I just changed the tag that I was looking at to something I prefered. I even submitted a few pages and voted on a few.

Even though it is a great tool to help you kill some time I feel that it lacks a few things, I would really like to quickly bookmark pages and probably want a screenshot of it then. Also SU feeds doesn’t really give you the tags that you tagged the pages with so its a bit useless if I wanted to intergrate some of my own content back to my own site. These features are cool, I might even make my own version of SU just for me to bookmark sites and tagem so that users can see where I went today and such. It would be pretty cool.

I recently was in discussion with a fellow student, and he was trying to get a site up for students to allow him to make some bucks. Now I had the same idea too a while ago but after rethinking about it and weighing my current job and setting up and managing a community, I went straight for the job.

Reason being that everybody loves to make money and I chose the easiest way. I know some of you would be thinking that staying behind the pc all day making posts here and there would be easier than going to work than actually do something. That is untrue I feel that working is actually easier to make money than sitting behind a pc all day posting and building up your forum for months and on.

If you need the money you would go to a stable job and get the money. But if you got the money and got plenty of time to waste be my guest and build a site and try leave off the ads.

The only thing that would disprove my choice would be that you had a perfect idea and it targeted everyone and everyone found it as a need. But life is harsh and ideas aren’t always the same from thoughts to paper.

Recently I posted an entry on Navigation how much is too much?, but in this entry we will focus on the forum side of having sub forums. Many times on TAZ we regulars find that a lot of the forums that tries to get reviews on their forum, have too many categories.

This is really common in the getting started forum. A lot of the forums having trouble to keep users interested are just not focusing on one thing but the whole lot. Sometimes they get overtaken by a free forum where they started to focus on one small thing.

A perfect example of the above case is this person asking for help as he go a competition and the competition is stealing his members. Of course he would be trying to steal your members it is a dog eat dog world out there and you better be on top of things to keep up.

I suggest reading my article related to the case above

The normal amount of categories will all depend on how your current categories are being filled with threads. If you start off with only 3-5 categories which are all specific to your market segment and focusing only on them you could expand out from there on. To expand those categories you have to see what types of threads are being posted everytime in one of your categories and when you have a fair amount you might want to seperate them from that current category to a new one which focuses on that on thread. And you should go on and on until you have maxed out your community.

Now to introduce a new segment you would first try to start a new category (only 1 at a time) and dedicate yourself to keeping it maintained until it gets popular enough. Remember to keep maintaining the rest of your forum too. Once it gets popular enough that users respond to other users you then lay off that one a bit and see if the popularity of it gradually decreases or not. If it does keep on improving it until you feel there is enough activity. Or else just scrap it and keep maintaining and improving your current categories.

Recently I have been looking at the navigation side of a site and one of the common problems I see on most sites is that they have an abundance of topics and navigation of a site.

Some have more than 20+ links to different parts of there sites. It is good that they provide such a wide and intense topic coverage but that could overwhelm the user with too many choice. Thus resulting in major confusion on where to start.

The solution to this issue is to cut down to the general topics. By general I mean broaden area which relates to several topics. For example these topics: review, guides & general news could all be categorised into Article.

Or allowing users to have their own choice of categories. One of the best example is Yahoo home page. It allows you to choose which content to display, with that I think you don’t need to be registered to customise the page but it would be temporary until your cookies get deleted. But never mind that as long as your viewers are happy they would tend to register if they feel that your site is offering enough.

This directly targeting modification/components/modules/addons that simulates a personal blog for forum software such as vb and ipb. They are simply a waste of time if you are offering this as a personal blog for each user!

The reason being that it isn’t a real personal blog any more but more of a governed blog. The user of the blog cannot control who accesses it and who doesn’t (ip ban). There is always the admins who can see what you have on drafts (not really personal). Not only that you lose propriety content over the post you made but once the founders of that forum decides to abandon or just not continue with that forum you may expect that your blog will be lost with it for ever. One more thing, with blogs hosted within forums the design of the blog would be as any other blog that is being hosted on that forum, so it really doesn’t differentiate your blog to any other apart from content. Believe me sometimes the content would be just as boring to read if the reader sees the same template or site design over and over again for different topics.

The best thing to do in my opinion is to host your own blog with softwares like wordpress or other ones. It will be better as you will be able to control the design and manage a lot more. You will be able to add addons/plugins of your choice and you don’t have to rely on someone else to control how long your blog can stay online. Also you will benefit from full rights over your content and be able to express yourself as freely as possible.

Now what the forum blogs could be really be used for..
Everyone knows what a development blog or a company blog is, why not use that addon to do just that? You will be able to merge multiple blogs into one and it would be more interesting as you could hide your real personl blog from your companies blog and life. One of the amazing things you could achieve by having a company blog with ip.blog is that you could break down the progress and development of each feature of you product by the blogger itself. As surely they would have been specialised to do one thing for your product so that means the reader can filter out who he/she wants to read depending on his/her preference.

Edit:
Here are some links to IPB Blog Modules:

EasyIPB’s own blog module which is called IPB Journal 
The official IPB  Blog Module

I just bought a new phone on contract with O2. It is pretty cool it has eve=
rything I want! Email, internet, ms office, wifi, fone, skype and loads mor=
e!. I will post some pics of it later on as I am just testing the capbilit=
y of writing blogs from here. :p=