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Alex Laburu raises a serious point about Stumbleupon; that perverse incentives are built in to the system by SU's business model, in which the company makes money, not from visits to blogs on their system, but by getting paid for "stumbles" - random visits to sponsor websites taking place through their system. Under such a model, Laburu argues, a well written blog costs the company money, because it is a blog visitors are less likely to leave soon via a stumble - and those following its links aren't stumbling. He raises a good point (among others), one that should lead SU users to view with concern the supposedly good feature that is the absence of advertising on our blogs on SU, because it provides SU admins with a short term incentive to side with those misusing the system at the expense of those using it constructively. Which does leave us with the question of how Diigo is making its money, does it? One might ask if many of the users bring this sort of thing upon themselves - listen in on the screaming when the very possibility of introducing advertising is raised, on some sites, as if the hosting service didn't need to make money. Perhaps when the subject arises here - Diigo is still in Beta as I write this - some of us might want to speak in support of that very sensible source of revenue for a company we'd like to evolve in a healthier direction than that being taken by some of its competition, at the moment.

A group I've created as a gathering pplace for users of that service. So far (I'm posting this on 8:35 pm on March 15, 2009) there seems to be little interest in the idea.

Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia (where I was before I came to Diigo) is interviewed, following the collapse of that service, and explains what he did wrong, without evasion. Many of us wish him well, and hope that both he manages to rebuild his company after this regrettable incident.

One of the few pieces of good news that came out of the Jan 30 mishap that swelled Diigo's ranks with former Ma.gnolia users was that many of the lost bookmarks were recoverable, especially if those users were using Friendfeed as well. I'm not generally a fan of that service, as it doesn't allow for comment screening, but one can set one's feed to "private", and a little extra insurance doesn't hurt. Let's hope that Diigo never suffers a similar incident, but just in case it does, being ready for it isn't a bad thing.