Personally I halfway use Stumbleupon as my “bookmarks”, and I do often come back later.

It may also be worthwhile for the occasional added backlink (I recently put an RSS feed on my homepage at hokstad.com of my recent “thumbs up” stumbles, for example.

The first two paragraph of this article does hit the nail on the head, though: Far too few sites make their value proposition clear at the top of the page. That doesn’t matter much when dealing with your “normal” users that know what you’re about, but it matters for a new user that comes to your site without knowing what to expect. In the case of StumbleUpon that applies EVERY time, and so if it’s not blatantly obvious in a second or so I’ll move on.

But as the post says: Performance is also vital. I won’t wait long for a page to load. Again because I don’t know what value it’ll have, and most aren’t worth the wait, so I’d rather take my chances with the next page.

Think of writing for StumbleUpon and other “random” traffic sources as writing for a tabloid newspaper: You have a couple of seconds to get the attention of your public before you lose them. You need to both be able to deliver the page and show them why they should stay in that short amount of time.

The good side is that focusing your writing on that will be a benefit to you when dealing with “normal” readers too, who’ll otherwise just move on to the next item in their feed reader.

(a) rate a post/page, OR
(b) stumble the next post/page

and they do not normally take time to drop a comment or two. People would say that they use SU to “find great content”, but when they’ve found it, they just give it a “thumb’s up” and then proceed to stumble the next page.

Which brings us back to square one: Who will benefit from all these stumbling? Definitely not the bloggers because what good would it do to bloggers if visitors merely “pass by” their posts/pages without leaving a comment, or subscribing to the blog?

So to all stumblers, if you stumbled upon a post/page you like, why not leave the blogger a comment? I’m sure it would make everybody’s experience better