Once you are logged in you have access to three main areas (discover, favorites, stumblers) and several account related options in the header. Discover displays new websites based on criteria like popularity, rating or topics selected by the Stumbleupon user.

The favorites section contains the listing of all websites that have been added to Stumbleupon by the user. It is also the place to add a new website to the service.Stumblers finally displays a list of friends, visitors and other information related to other Stumbleupon members.

It is still possible to stumble upon new websites by clicking on the stumble button in the main interface. Everything feels more natural and in place after the redesign. Head over to Stumbleupon if you want to check out the new features.

Google Unified Search is a very interesting search add-on for the Firefox web browser. You might have read about add-ons that combine Google search results with those of other search engines such as Bing or Wolfram Alpha. Google Unified Search takes that concept a step further by integrating multiple search engines in Google results. It adds support for Bing, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stumbleupon and Delicious in the Google search results.

Search results of one search engine besides Google Search are displayed at a time but it is possible to switch to the results of another one without having to reload the page. By default Google search results and Bing search results are displayed in the interface. A control in the top right corner makes it possible to switch the alternative search engine to another one.

A left click on a search result in the Google column will open the website as usual. A click on a result in the alternative search engine on the other hand will open the result just in the area of that search engine. Users who want to open the website normally will have to open it in a new tab or window instead.

Google Unified Search is an excellent way of displaying additional information about a search term in the Google search results.

The very same page contains additional options to shorten the message and post it to Twitter or Facebook. Both of these options require a Stumbleupon account which gets linked to the Twitter and Facebook account.

Su.pr provides two interesting options that can make it interesting to users. The first is that every url that gets shortened gets also submitted to Stumbleupon. That option might be especially interesting to webmasters who post their new blog posts or websites to Twitter or Facebook anyway. This way they can post it to Stumbleupon as well which usually generates some extra traffic. Some webmasters have experienced hundreds of additional visitors coming from Stumbleupon using this method. A WordPress plugin has been provided by Stumbleupon to automate the process.

It is furthermore possible to move the shortened url from su.pr to the domain the blog is hosted on so that links will point to that domain instead.

The second interesting aspect of Su.pr is an extensive statistics section which will give the user traffic details about the url that has been posted. This includes clicks, referrers, re-tweets and reviews. A last option that sounds interesting is the ability to schedule posts.

Su.pr is a convenient URL shortening service with some interesting features. It could become very popular with webmasters who post their articles and websites to Twitter and Facebook. Their main benefits are the statistics that are provided and that the url gets posted to Stumbleupon as well.

I didn’t really think I could be interested in yet another crowd-powered news aggregating website… Mixx, Reddit, Regator, Social Median,  Soshable, Propeller, Sphinn even… whether they’re the next Digg I have no idea… but it sure isn’t worth the time signing up in my opinion.

I was very interested in the announcement yesterday however, that a new service called ‘NewsCred’ was launching with the aim of gathering and aggregating articles based on their credibility over blind crowd popularity.

It’s a fantastic objective, one which anyone who has used Digg over the last few years would probably love to see… it’s all too common where completely bogus stories are Dugg right to the front page (and sometimes consequently removed by the "invisible hand’ of non-existent editors’).

Crowd’s usually vote based on personal preference and opinion as well… a story about Microsoft may be brilliant, well-researched and accurate… but is buried by Apple fans purely because they dislike Microsoft.

W ether or not NewsCred can get around that will be interesting to see, although it isn’t the first to attempt this strategy; NewsTrust has been around for a few years (although I had never heard of it before) and has had slow but steady growth.

The most useful and interesting thing about NewsCred is the analytics option… you can examine the credibility of a publication based on how it fared on NewsCred. Just one indicator sure… but with time it should really be a good measure of the reporting quality of various news sources.

You can also customise the NewsCred front page based on your interests and the publications you prefer. In many ways, even if the credibility factor doesn’t worry you, it’s still a good source of daily news much like Google News.

The process can take a lot of time depending on the amount of websites that you have stumbled in the Stumbleupon account. Firefox will not react to user input during that time and it pretty much looks like it hangs. In the end however all stumbled websites are added to the Firefox bookmarks in a folder named Stumbleupon and several subfolders for different categories like Computers, Health or Business.

The export function is located in the Search & Tagging tab of the options of the Stumbleupon add-on. All websites that get stumbled after upgrading or installing the new toolbar will be saved automatically in the Firefox bookmarks as well which means that it is not necessary to export the Stumbleupon websites more than once.

Definitely an interesting option for many users of the Stumbleupon toolbar.

Digital Inspiration, one of my favorite blogs, discovered a way to use Stumbleupon without installing the toolbar. This means that everyone, no matter which browser he is using, may use Stumbleupon to discover new and interesting websites and use most of the functions like commenting on a website, voting for it and so on.

It all comes down to the url stumbleupon.com/demo/#url=http://www.ghacks.net/ which will open a small toolbar on top of the website with the common features known from Stumbleupon. Just change the url from my url to one that you prefer.

Clicking on the Stumble button opens a random website from all stored websites at Stumbleupon. I like this gives a vote for the current website if you have an account at Stumbleupon and Send to a friend lets you send the website to a friend. The four buttons afterwards are more interesting. Stumble Websites, Photos, Videos or People.

The bar will remain if you click on a button letting you stumble websites for as long as you like. Wonderful way to discover new websites.

A sweat little object is popping up in front when you visit Fichey and you can use that to take a look at all the sites that were popular at those websites in the past. Since Fichey is relatively new you can only access sites that were popular beginning with July the 6th of 2007.

Every site that was popular in the past is opened in the same browser tab which means that you browse one site at a time and can flip through them. It looks like Ajax was used to create the effect, looks pretty nice. Pretty good way to flip through many popular sites in a very short period of time.

Update: The Fichey website is no longer accessible. It is not clear if this is a temporary situation or if the project has been abandoned by its developers.

I’m not aware of any comparable service. An alternative that shows trending topics and what’s popular right now is Popurls. The srevice displays popular stories on Digg, Reddit, Chime, YouTube, Flickr and a lot of other popular websites.

Content blocks and other parameters on the site can be customized on the site. Users can furthermore hoover over topics to get a one paragraph description of the linked article. It is also important to note that a click on the title links to the media directly (which can be an image, video, text or other media), while a click on the comment icon loads the actual page the media link was posted on. The two can be the same destination but they do not have to be, especially not on voting style sites.

Stumbleupon on the other hand is using a different approach. Their users vote and review sites using a toolbar. The main feature of Stumbleupon is the stumble feature. You select a category and click on stumble and a random website will be loaded. Websites will be shown more often the more votes and reviews they receive.

The difference between Digg and Stumbleupon (from a webmasters point of view) is that Digg is far more controlled by its users than Stumbleupon is. If you add a link to an article on your blog you will probably get flammed and dugg down pretty fast. The concept of Digg is that users decide if a story is worth making it to the frontpage. They can do this by “digging” (positive) the story or by “burying” (negative) it. The problem is that some “gangs” work on Digg that digg down articles as soon as they appear.

Lets say you post an article about a new version of Firefox, link to the Mozilla ftp site and describe the new features. This article will surely be dugg down simply because it is not linking directly to the Mozilla ftp site from Digg. If however a authority site comes along, let us say Lifehacker, Pc Magazine or Gizmodo the same article will make it to the frontpage without any problems. Even if they report about it later than you did.

The conclusion here is: Digg is great for sites that have a certain authority. Lifehacker could probably submit a article with no information whatsoever and would still make it to the frontpage.

Stumbleupon on the other hand is different. If you submit your site to the service it will drive traffic to your site right away. Not that much at the beginning but it is targeted traffic. If you do get additional reviews and “thumbs up” your traffic level will rise. I experienced it myself that you can very well get hundreds of daily visitors over a long period with 3-4 reviews of the site. Getting this amount of reviews is normally not a big problem, even for sites with not that many visitors. Remember that not only your regular visitors but also the users that visit your site from Stumbleupon may give you a thumbs up.

My conclusion is rather obvious. If you have a new website and want to get some traffic use Stumbleupon. Digg is only worth it if you are writing about something exclusively, new or groundbreaking.