my stumbleupon heroes

As I've mentioned before, I've become quite active on StumbleUpon. And while it is easy to find new sites via their Mozilla toolbar, it isn't as easy to find good ones. Affiliate marketers and web profiteers have been converging upon these social bookmarking sites in an order to "Stumble" their own sites. Fortunately, they are easy to recognize, and even easier to mark as invalid. All you need to do when you run across one of these sites is to check who submitted it. From there, you can go down the list and tag each site as "spam" or "scam" or "affiliate"...and hopefully it helps to weed these types of sites out for the next stumbler.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that affiliate marketing has no place in social bookmarking. I'd just like these sites to be filed in the appropriate category - shopping, for example. Historic watches on eBay, in my opinion,l don't belong in the "history" category. I also believe that affiliate marketers should be using the toolbar and stumbling/rating other people's sites, too - not just their own.

There are a group of stumblers (my heroes) who are taking it upon themselves to expose these scam artists for what the are. Thank goodness for that.