I have a husband and we have our own small business. I also do contracted research and writing work, and I have hobbies and charitable club work as well. My time is precious to me. My relationships with friends and family is where I choose to invest my “free” time in.

My blogs are not monetized and do not benefit from having a high bounce rate created by ad clicking floods of one hit wonders, and I observe that this is not the case with many stumblers, who rely on affiliate income schemes and/or the flood of traffic to produce ad clickers that make them income.

I am currently considering whether or not to continue with stumbleupon. Although I have found many interesting sites on stumbleupon and that “discovery” is the model of how to use stumbleupon correctly, as opposed to forming gangs who vote up each other’s posts every day, I have noted that there are many gangs of mutual stumblers who submit and stumble, tweet, reteweet, friendfeed, Digg, reddit, blogengage, etc. each and every one of each others posts continuously.

Well, my experience is that stumbleupon can bring in many hits in a flood that amount to creating a high bounce rate that I have referred to above. I have spent hours discovering, reviewing and giving the thumbs up only to articles that I feel are deserving. I’m not inclined to become one of the “mutual” submissions gangs that pervade social media and social networks these days. The whole social network experience has become one of tacit mutual agreements to spend every day submitting and voting up their “friends” articles and it’s distasteful to me. It reminds me of schoolyard gangs. And, in essence, it amounts to gaming the system and polluting the blogopshere and internet with the same links to the same posts circulating round and round endlessly.

So I’m assessing whether I wish to be on the social media merry-go-round at all and if I do decide to stay in the playground then I will need to do some “pruning”.

But I feel that the message gets more and more true as we become more comfortable with social media! I do agree with most points, but I do feel that any time “stumbling” is wasted time. With an hour you could do something much more constructive with your time.

Anyways, thanks

Remember that every comment that appears on your blog makes a contribution to your blog’s brand. Those who attempt to “use” me and my blog by being overly familiar, and those who submit comments replete with keywords in anchor text, rather than their usernames in an attempt to divert traffic to their own commercial sites or monetized blogs will not see their will be done in my blogs. Also I do not enable those who do not play well with others and demand “freedom of speech” without accepting responsibility for their inflammatory and defamatory words. My stand is that if they want a pulpit or a soapbox upon which they can stand and abuse others, then they can get their own blog and I’ll be sure never to visit it or link to it.