StumbleUpon | judefa's blog posts

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37482004/

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:29:44 -0800

Approximately 29 things I would like to think I'll do in the next five years

1. Gain more energy
2. See the back of workmen and repairers (ref long-running saga concerning my home)
3. Read books again w/o sneaking a look at the internet every few minutes
4. See some kind of dent on the mortgage debt
5. Become reacquainted with my paints and pastels
6. Somehow make domestic chores come naturally
7. Quit you, SU (but tks, you're helping me with V4)
8. Reacquaint myself with NZ -- beyond seeing friends and family

9. Develop a writing style
10. Clean out my wardrobe
11. Learn to trust people more
12. Write about my travels
13. Write about the follies of internet romance (admittedly MY follies)
14. Get back into the clothes I was wearing 3-4 years ago (pre-SU)
15. See justice for Palestinians

16. Own an iTablet, or whatever Apple decides to call its electonic reader
17. Visit the Adirondacks, New England and Canada's Maritime Provinces
18. Pay off my credit card and kiss Amex goodbye forever
19. Visit Snezana in Serbia
20. Visit Cloggo in Yorkshire, the Forest hippies in Lancashire and Johnshaven's clan in Scotland
21. Decide what to do with the 15 boxes of books I have been storing since last year
22. Watch the entire BBC series The Pallisers again
23. Find a video game that doesn't frustrate me (besides Hangman)
24. Buy a couch (good enough to lie in)
25. Go to Texas and meet Red, Imallforfrogs, Mike and a few others
26. Read more about the Brits who came to the antipodes in the 19th c 27. Get good -- and fast -- at photo editing
28. Develop my own art techniques combining old media and the iPod Touch
29. Learn more about my family history

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37427604/

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:24:39 -0800

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From the very well named Dontclickitdude.
Link purposely not included, since apart from this contribution it's all pretty much tits and arse and you wouldn't come to Judefa for locker-room titterings.

;=(
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http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37374435/

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:16:37 -0800

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http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37294351/

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:52:57 -0700

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��The visual elements and control over the look of pages and postings was a major factor for me, so I will be spending more time on projects of my own instead of here once we've all been switched over to V4.

We may win a visual editor back given enough wailing, but it will almost certainly be rudimentary (my 2c worth).
Those confident enough with coding and/or display may well even still produce attractive pages (which I for one will appreciate) if they're willing to put the work in, but most stumblers will find it too hard and/or frustrating, and think "why bother?".

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In time, blogs as a major aspect of SU will be forgotten and SU will be no more "visual" than Google and Twitter are.
Rather, it will be functional.
It will be a kind of encyclopedia of websites and reviews will be reduced to footnotes, much like the comments element on other commercial sites and independent blogs.
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The point about a Google/Twitter hybrid, I think, is that stumblers will use SU in a more passive way -- looking for something, and being looked FOR by advertisers -- rather than blogging or even reviewing (certainly in any depth).
They will just click on websites instead (as SU wants).
How you feel about that will largely determine your direction from here.
Me, I'm finding SU more useful than ever for page-sharing, which of course implies having built up a good body of friends.

If you want to make a "creative" or very personal blog (now) though, Tumblr would be the first port of call as it's easy and very alluring.
WordPress and Blogger offer a lot of possibilities if you have more content and commitment, but of course you're essentially working "alone" on those.�

�I like a combo of reading/feeds and visual treats, myself, so I play around here -- v much a work in progress, and something I find intriguing and endlessly customisable.��

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37275398/

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:25:44 -0700

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�Below are results of a quick vox pop carried out today -- I canvassed some friends via the toolbar for their views on impending changes at SU and these were some of the responses.

Notes:
1 None of these are my words
2 Most of the stumblers who responded are more gracious than me; one is even enthusiastic about V4

~ ~ ~

Visitors
I don't think the visitor page is dynamic enough.
It shows the last 100 visitors, in 4 pages of 25.
Assuming you have over 100 *different* visitors, this is fine; they will naturally recycle themselves, and it will appear that people visit your page.
If however you only have 11 regular visitors, and a couple of extras a day, your top 100 will hardly ever be updated.
�To my mind, seeing other stumblers visit your page is one of the stimuli that make a place seem alive.

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SU changes and support
The way SU do everything is utterly insensitive toward their most loyal and creative users, like some bar-fight that's spilled into an art class and knocked over all the easels, who then get chastised and go round sheepishly picking everyone's artwork back up off the floor.

Version 4
The main problem I have with it at present is unfamiliarity - I can't overstate this, since I think this is really everybody's problem, to some extent.

Immediate future
I will probably stay here.
I don't see myself ever being able to establish a relationship with people in another community like I have here.
I have analyzed other sites and I am just not feeling it.
I admit that SU has become a social networking site for me.
I stumble very rarely.
I will stay for the people that I have grown to care about, even if I do not necessarily post as much.

Profit motive
I am aware that SU will be changing and I have tried the new version, only for about 10 minutes, but, it was enough to make me want to jump ship, so to speak.
I will not be forced into, basically, a marketing blog, that really is only now just for making money.
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More below . . .

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37275674/

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:25:27 -0700

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���Continued from above -- pls see explanatory note at the top of that post�

��Change in culture
When I first started with SU, which was about 18 months ago, it really felt like I'd joined a vibrant and active community.
People were allowed an opinion, you could write what you liked and yeah some people ruffled a few feathers but SU was a good place, little by little though slowly and surely, I've noticed the bans, I've noticed that people aren't talking from the heart any more as they don't want to be booted off something that really has been a lifeline to some.
No, they must keep it politically correct and "nice" ... a shame really as life isn't like that and really things have changed into a place where the big bosses of SU only care about one thing ...
V4 is really for the spammers and sellers and not really for me anymore, and unfortunately I will be looking for pastures new :(

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Version 4
As for the new interface it's terrible, lacking in character, no scope for personalisation, shoddy colour choice, in fact totally lacking in life.

Friends
I even use it for therapeutical reasons.
Now, with all those changes I'm planning on leaving it, deleting my account, and that will be a real loss to me since I came to love SU and the friends I made.

Quitting
If the new interface stays what it is now, I'm out of here (and that will hurt very much, as SU was my virtual home/public face for the last 5 years, it's like a major body part now).
Maybe I'll change my mind for the sake of friends and new websites, but I doubt that.
What kept me hooked was always a combination of expressing myself, finding new content and meeting interesting people, and the new version will crush that in a moment.�
I don't want a leaner, meaner machine that will fetch sites 0,000000001 seconds faster and I don't want the devs' way of being social.

Beta testing
My biggest peeve with SU is the way they shove incomplete products upon us.
If they want to change an interface, fine.
But they really should bloody well finish the product before anyone outside of beta ever sees it.

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37275766/

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:25:06 -0700

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���Continued from above ��
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�Pro V4
I like the new V4 interface.
I complained consistently about V3 for many reasons including the default grid view and the drift to Facebook territory with the separate 'friend' catregory that was taking over from subscribing.
With V4 I feel like they've really listened and addressed many of the problems I and others highlighted with the ebay-inspired V3.
So overall I'm delighted about the change.
I had seriously thought of leaving SU but V4 might encourage me to stay.
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In implementing V4 they've made a few errors that have caused disproportionate unrest.
One is defaulting to the All page rather than reviews.
The others are relatively minor things like colors and tag clouds and so on.
Nothing fundamental and much of it is in the process of being fixed but they've made things harder than necessary for themselves.
Fortunately though they got the fundamental issue of ditching the separate and confusing 'friend' category right and, with the other bits fixed' I think life with V4 in SU will be a lot better than with V3.
As someone primarily interested in blogging, I think it will serve me better than V3 did.

Too much lost
The new interface means pretty much nothing to me, really.
I think it's ridiculous how they've eliminated most of the color choices and the visual editor (that would seem to go against the whole supposed "social network" aspect of the service, though it's ENORMOUSLY lacking in that regard anyway). Most of my friends have already left SU due mainly to its droves of terrible content and its ridiculous banning procedures, but as long as I can find pretty pictures I don't really see my "commitment" changing any.

Creativity
There is much MUCH I don't like about th�e new interface and a lot of features that have been removed or changed in what I consider a negative or useless way.
My first reaction was to consider leaving SU altogether.
Next I thought why should I, after all the work and pleasure and real friends made. Now I think - I believe I will use SU in a completely selfish manner.
They may not want creative blogs but I will maintain and strive for a COMPLETELY creative blog that is my own whether they like it or not.
I will not stumble aimlessly for SU, I will only thumb and stumble my own interests.
I will try and use this forced change to shake up my own patterns and maybe (hopefully) stretch in new creative directions that will be a benefit to myself.
This is what I am thinking at the moment - I just hate the thought of leaving and SU getting it all their own way.

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37154617/

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:02:28 -0700

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Muslim it is, then.

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Tks for pointing the way, �Doc�
Saved a lot of time and soul-searching.
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http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37137577/

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:02:30 -0700

Continued from above

What SU is doing, in fact, is enlisting our friends sorry subscribees to send us to websites rather than their reviews or postings.
I had an inkling this was happening some months back when the default tag for stumblers was changed by the system from "stumblers" to "Stumbleupon".

I don't like that my friends are being used to push me this way and that, and am damn sure that's not their intention either.
They are not promoters, they are people.

The other thing I will touch on -- cos I have already gone into it at length previously -- is our "home" pages.

Not even mentioning the stultifying limits now placed on formatting, colourways and self-expression . . . let's just look at what happens when we log in.

Here's what I see when I log in to V4 (and btw I still can't navigate it, let alone post from there) . . .

After looking at it (nonplussed) for a minute or two I can see that what I've been presented with is a bunch of thumbnails and headings I am supposed to click on.
This is fundamentally annoying to me, and seems to affect most of us the same way.
In my case I feel as though I'm being accosted by hawkers and proselytisers on my way home from work.
All I want to do is get in the door and sit down before making MY OWN decisions about where to go next.

It would be kind of good PR, too, for SU to present me with my own page when I get in that door but in this search for simplicity and common sense it has forgotten that!

No, when we log in we are met with a barrage of stripped-down (ie useless) information -- provided unwillingly by our subscribees -- and a list of numbers alongside the websites that seem to imply there's a competition going on.
It all feels clinical, impersonal and exploitative, and we have no tools with which to modify this all-important entry point.
In Web 2.0 terms, that is very retrogressive and makes no appeal to a person's intelligence.

I found What's New annoying enough with its nagging, but at least it included a couple of lines written by the stumblers themselves, as a tease to visit their pages.
This new way gives equal billing to clicks and reviews, with no regard to the fact that a click takes a milli-second and a review (or, dare I say it, blog posting) might have involved hours of work.

Continued below

http://judefa.stumbleupon.com/review/37137623/

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:02:08 -0700

Continued from above

Eventually we find our way to our home page -- which has been in various states of disarray over recent weeks but at least now in most cases conforms to what we posted in the first place.

The changes forced on us with what we called Beta (from mid-07), then V3 (from Dec 08-Jan 09) and the grid view soon after were all intended to make us play the numbers game for them.
If we didn't know then, we should now.

If someone can give me a good non-marketing reason for the new UI, please speak up.
Cos the way I see it, each new phase of SU has been a further attempt to re-engineer it as a PR/promotions network.

The marketers who are proliferating on the web and in SU are reviewing the changes favourably -- as they would, because it works for them as a means of dissemination.
A few are complaining that they can no longer "mass share"; but mostly they're happy, from what I'm reading.

So the question for me is, do the bosses want to push on with luring people into clicking on websites and away from stumblers come what may, or can they still be made to see things from a (non-marketing) stumbler's point of view?

Dialague was pretty much absent during V3 and appears to be only superficially productive now -- as has been eloquently pointed out here by someone who started out as a believer.

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