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People seemed to like the post that I wrote a couple days ago, Five Reasons Why You Might Not Want to be Top Stumbler. (Said in a Sandy Field tone…You liked me, you really liked me!)

Traffic poured in without slowing down for almost three days. This was a good thing since my youngest came down with a cold and this is the first real time I’ve had to write in a few days.Its fun posting something on SU and having it make the Buzz, StumbleUpon’s listing of the hottest posts in the most popular topics.

This was the first time I’d ever had a post from here get buzzed, and watching the buzz effect behind the scenes (through a stat reader) is nothing short of addicting.

(From your SU page, click on Websites to see the most recent Buzz posts.)

So what did I learn? (aka Where’s the beef?)

For one thing, I learned just how important my friends are. Not in my own valuation…my friends already mean the world to me! I mean in the StumbleUpon scheme of things.

I’ve written before about StumbleUpon’s Recent Reviews, one of my favorite parts about the new format. When you post a new review to your SU page, that review goes out to ALL your friends. And, as long as each person doesn’t have 10 other friends who post after you do, your review will stay on their page.

I wasn’t thinking about the Recent Reviews page when I checked my stats Monday evening. In fact, I kept trying to figure out how I was getting links from anyone.stumbleupon.com/home when I knew that clicking on that would take me to StumbleUpon’s main page. (It was late, I was tired…do either of these excuses work for not figuring it out quicker?)

On Tuesday, I when I noticed I was still getting a lot of these /home pages, I finally realized that the first ones I’d seen had all been from my friends.

That’s how I discovered that what I was watching was the power of the Recent Review page at work. When my review first went out, some of my friends saw it and were interested. They visited SU Com by clicking on the link provided. Then they wrote a review about it, and their friends saw that review and visited. Unlike the Buzz, where only the first review can get posted, with the RR page, anytime a stumbler writes a review, it gets sent out to all their friends. Wow!!

From InfopreneurBlog, a heart surgeon for children, social entrepreneur, and Chairman of the Dr.Mani Children Heart Foundation.

The other things I’ve noticed have been visits directly from stumbler.stumbleupon.com. These are where someone was viewing a stumbler’s page and decided their review or my page title or something sounded interesting. Where the RR pages would generate just a couple of views per each individual listing, some of these reviews brought in a nice number of visitors.

I haven’t mentioned the stumbleupon.com/refer numbers, although they were the highest numbers. The refer numbers are the direct result of the page getting thumbed up, and another thumb up, and another one, etc. Outside of showing me that the page itself is listed on StumbleUpon, how many people bopped through my site, and why my bandwidth usage shows a jump for the past few days, I really don’t know of any other information to gleam from those links. Although it is nice to know the page has been listed on SU if I haven’t given it a thumb up myself. Is there any other information you gain from these?

There’s one final source of stat information that I haven’t mentioned. And it’s available for anyone to see. The Website review page is the page that everyone goes to if they want to leave a review. Here you can see all the reviews that people have written, and the last 50 people who gave the page a thumb up (you’ll see 10 on the main page, and another 40 if you click “Show me more”). The people shown on the Website review page, are the stumblers who were interested in what they saw. At least some of them likely wanted to preserve the link to revisit another time. All of them were interested enough in the page that they took the time to rate it.

I’ve read several articles where people fuss about the kind of traffic that StumbleUpon brings in. Everything from complaints about stumblers spending no time visiting a site, to SU users ignoring insta-ads (see my article The AdSense Dilemma for more about this), to disappointment that stumblers weren’t visiting other pages.

Perhaps because I didn’t expect much (before Monday, the most visitors I’d had in a day had been 2100 and I thought that was great), I was pleasantly surprised looking over the past 3 days.

I’m not saying that out of almost 20,000 visitors, everyone added my RSS feed (which was unfortunately hard to find until late on the second day), read every other post I’d made, or clicked on a link. Being a relatively unknown blogger, I didn’t expect a large turn around. But yet more than 10% reacted with the blog in some shape, whether by visiting more pages, subscribing to the RSS feed, or clicking one of the links. To me, that seems pretty good.

Yesterday, Vince Bank, who subscribes to Guy Kawasaki’s tweets on Twitter, complained that Guy was “over-promoting his Truemors site” which prompted Dr. Mani, a friend whose blogs I really enjoy (and learn a lot from), to ask this question, “What is Twitter to You?”

I’ve written about Twitter before on here. It’s a rather interesting site where you can send messages out to everyone who subscribes to you. The catch is, the messages can only be 140 characters long.

One of my favorite things about twitter is how easy it is to send the messages. If you’re out and about, you can set it up on your cell phone (if yours isn’t lost by your 4 year old, like mine is at the moment). If you’re on your computer, you can set it up on an IM (internet messenger). I set it up on G-Talk, which is my favorite messaging program. All I have to do to send a tweet is to type it into gtalk, just like I’m sending a message to a friend. Voila, the message gets sent out to anyone who’s following me.

A couple weeks ago, I read Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide. Some of it, like how to mark your favorite tweets, I found really interesting, especially since I’ve only recently started using Twitter. Other parts, such as what constitutes noise and what information is good to send, I suspect we’d disagree about. Which gets me back to Guy’s tweets.

Guy Kawasaki uses Twitter to talk about everything from the best Truemors posting yet to what kind of underwear he wears in addition to linking to interesting Truemors posts. I’ve found that I really enjoy the combination of “noise” (personal) and “business” posts, it leaves me with the sense that I’m hearing from someone real instead of just a news machine. I do want to know where he gets his Truemors links though, since often I hear them from Guy before even the news channels broadcast them.

Now I’ll admit, I probably use Twitter differently than a lot of people. I’m just learning about professional blogging, so although I’m interested in problogging, I’m not looking just for business information. Instead I use Twitter in much the same way I use Digg and a few other sites, as a service that will give me interesting, current information that I can share with other stumblers. With companies such as PBS and CNN posting up to the minute news on Twitter, it’s an easy way to stay on top of anything new.

So what is Twitter to me? My first instinct is to answer that it’s a resource, but I think that’s too broad of an answer. I loved this description of twitter from Dr. Mani’s site. It was one of the first things I ever read by him, and probably one of the reasons I started following him on Twitter. For myself, I think it reminds me a bit of a ham radio. You never know what you’re going to hear over it, but know that in the end, you’re going to learn some things and make some new friends, and all in all, that’s what’s important, isn’t it?