Here are the lucky winners….

- Kate Bowles
- Zebedee
- Astrid Weigel

Congratulations to all 3 winners and a huge thank you to everyone who submitted work.  You will be able to read all about what happens on our visit to the Maker Faire event in the September Monthly Update post on the blog, watch out for that on Monday 5th September.

What is Stumble upon?

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds the best of the web, recommended just for you.

It is essentially a bookmarking site where members can rate and review web pages, but there’s much more to it than that!  Members can use stumble to randomly browse through websites based loosley on a number of topics they have indicated a preference for.  Each time a new page is displayed after clicking the stumble button a member can click the thumbs up or down to rate that site.  Thumbs up means that stumble upon will offer up similar pages, constantly tailoring the pages it displays and improving the users browsing experience.

Great if you want to spend half an hour messing about online finding great websites (it’s addictive, so beware), but how can it help bring traffic to your shop?

Thumbs Up

Clicking the ‘thumbs up’ also increases the chance that a website will be displayed to other members with similar interests, validating the site.  So the more thumbs up your web page receives the more chances it has of being displayed during a members stumbling session.

Members can also network by following other stumblers.  There are 11million people using Stumble Upon, chances are you will find some people with very similar interests! Following someone influences the sites you see as you stumble as the recommendation system considers the users you’re following when it displays pages.

Take a look at the stumble Upon help area, it’s full of answers on how to get started.

How do I Get ‘Stumbled’?

So I was complaining about no views earlier. The last week or so has just been between 10 – 20 visits a day. Just went to GA (google analytics) now and the graph was through the roof for yesterday and today. And when I say through the roof I really mean THROUGH THE FLIPPIN’ ROOF! http://www.folksy.com/items/385057-Celtic-Love-… has, in the last 2 days, had 3525 views Is that a record???

Impressive!!! It was all down to Dave from Folksy Shop Gelert Design being given the thumbs up by a fellow Folksy seller, and then by lots of other stumblers who all loved his work.

Network with online friends and get into the habit of giving each others items the thumbs up.  This will give your listings a chance of being displayed to other stumble users.  Post in forums, on twitter and facebook, letting everyone know that you are a member of Stumble Upon.  You can also help get stumbled by posting links via Su.pr.

Su.pr is a url shortening service from stumble Upon that connects with twitter and facebook and prompts you to add the thumbs up to any new post or product you are promoting.  It shows live clicks, the number of visits from Stumblers, members that ‘liked’ your page and also suggests times of the day to  schedule posting your links.  The screen shot below shows a link to a networking thread on the folksy forums. There were 50 clicks from the link posted to twitter via su.pr, then a further 81 hits from Stumble upon users after it was submitted to the crafts and forums categories, doubling the number of visitors.

It’s not quite as easy as just adding a stumble upon review or giving your shop or blog the thumbs up – it’s a chain reaction and it seems you need stumblers to be consistently clicking the thumbs up in order for your page to keep occuring in members stumbles.  If you have been stumbled, like Dave was you may see huge increases in views but by analysing your traffic with Google Analytics you will find that visitors may have only stayed for 10 seconds or less.  This is the nature of stumbling – you are adding your shop into a slide show of other web pages all targeted at the user who is driven to keep clicking quickly to find more.  The upside is that the amount of targeted traffic you will recieve if your shop gets stumbled can be phenomonal and a percentage of those visitors may stop to browse. Once they have given you the thumbs up, your site is bookmarked in their favourites page, so they can easily find you again in the future!

Please give Folksy and the Folksy blog the thumbs up next time you are using stumble upon, the increased traffic will benefit everybody!

As always we would love to hear your comments – any images of gorgeous handmade goods featured on this post are avaiable from Folksy to buy, just click images for more details.

Homespun, recycled wares are a byword for cool in these straitened times. So right now we love folksy.com, an online collective of designers and craftmakers selling everything from knitted egg cosies to felt-covered journals – all oozing handmade charm. And if you’re short on ideas but long on free time, it even tells you how to make things yourself. Perfect for a one-off find – if you hurry.

So, hello Guardian people and thank you for liking us :)

image: jay pendergrass (via)

But this raises an interesting aspect of language and etymology, the history of terms and how their meaning changes. In the UK Folksy is tied up with folk music and ‘traditional’ cultural practices. Folksy in the US has far greater currency than in the UK and is used to denote an “earthy”, “of the people”, quality. This seems to be being used negatively in the campaign by the educated and political elite in the US where Folksy has been used as a rather derogatory term to mean “unsophisticated”. How do you see it? What does it mean to you?

We set up our stall trying to create a living room environment which kinda worked, but what did work was our “make table” where we beavered away making blinkybugs [see below] and Rob being far more technical hacked a Nintendo controller to make an optical mouse and also made an “ambient orb light” which responded to ‘the internet’. What about the internet it was responding has not yet become clear.

Anyway, we had a great time, got lots of good feedback, not to mention loads of beta testers and a possible invite to do a big festival event this summer and I got to have a brief chat with Matthew D’Ancona [albeit unwittingly] which was marvelous. Thanks Russell :) and thanks to all those crafters who helped us to provide goods for the event [Lucia, Alice, Zoe, etc...].

Now, having dug around a bit I see that it has a pretty broad use, mainly signifying: informal; familiar; rural and of course to describe the Folk music and fashion ‘style’. For me it’s about people and celebrating everyday creativity in an age which often reduces us to Taylorist automatons in offices everywhere [and see Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk on YouTube on how we're killing creativity in the education process]. And if you’re interested it’s worth seeing what other people signify as folksy [and get a sense for how creativity in crafts is flourishing] and there’s no better place to do that than on flickr.