I recently posted a link back to my blog on both Digg and Netscape to see what would happen. The results were not as shocking as you might think... until you factor in StumbleUpon!

The entry I linked to with both news aggregators was The Three Letters. I did not know what sort of result to expect but I was overwhelmed by the response of the Diggers and underwhelmed by the response of the 'Scapers.

Once the story hit the front page on Digg I was seeing over a thousand hits per hour. The story has gotten well over 1,000 Diggs since then yet, on Netscape, the same story has only ever received 1 vote, mine!

I wasn't exactly surprised by this turn of events. Everyone knows that Digg is the big dog in terms of social book marking sites and that Netscape is nothing more than a cheap attempt at riding on Digg's coattails but... not a single vote on Netscape?

At then end of the week I checked my web server statistics to see where my traffic came from in regards to this and I saw something very interesting:

Day One: Digg 15K hits, Netscape 3 hits, StumbleUpon 898 hits.
Day Two: Digg 8K hits, Netscape 1 hit, StumbleUpon 1,205 hits.
Day Three Digg: 1K hits, Netscape 0 hits, StumbleUpon 1,423 hits.

This trend continued until after a week’s time I was averaging below 100 hits from Digg and 1K hits from Stumbleupon. This led me to a very interesting conclusion:

Digg brings in the hits, but StumbleUpon has the legs.

In the end, Digg had brought in the highest number of hits, but they were fleeting. A massive wave of people will go from Digg, to your blog and then never return. Netscape? Do I even need to linger on that one? StumbleUpon... there be the long tail for a blogger!

I'm not going to go into anything to do with advertising revenue in this article so don't expect a treatise on how StumbleUpon effects your advertising revenue!

I do not know if this story would have gotten the legs it acquired if it had not appeared on Digg. I do not know who first gave the link a thumbs up and thereby caused the Stumble stampede. The only thing I do know is that Digg and StumbleUpon are a great team!

Just as MS has been recently known to say that you should ignore the PS3 and buy an X-Box 360 and a Wii I must say to ignore Netscape and go with the powerhouse of Digg and StumbleUpon!