Before I get into the details of why, please read the instructions.

It's quite simple really. You may be here for another reason or you may be here specifically for this reason. Either way it doesn't matter. Leave a comment for this post with the page you would like to have stumbled and I'll do it as soon as I possibly can. I will normally write a StumbleUpon review for pages that I stumble this way, unless there's already a ton of reviews for it and I have nothing that I can add. It's rare, but it happens. You are NOT required to do anything in reciprocation. Nothing at all!

(I will also stumble your page if you send it to me through the StumbleUpon toolbar or send me a message.)

Please note that I will NOT stumble a sponsored post (I do not want to be responsible for someone flagging your post as spam) or any page that I find personally offensive.

(I'll be placing the link to this article on the right sidebar this afternoon. Read below to find out why.)

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And now for the why:

When I woke up this morning, I had an epiphany. To understand it, you have to know what I did in the past few months. I originally wrote two articles, Comment for a Digg and Comment for a Stumble, near the end of the May. The stumble article was definitely more popular. The popularity of it waned during June but not because of the article itself. I was bedridden and had difficulty keeping up. My regular readers knew about it because I wrote about it periodically.

A few days ago, I pulled the links from my sidebar that made it easy to find the articles in question and I wrote about it in Links to Comment for a Digg or a Stumble Removed from the Sidebar. That was partly in response to other articles I read about reciprocal obligations or perceived obligations. I wrote that using the StumbleUpon toolbar was more effective and had written pretty much the same thing in the previous StumbleUpon - A Blog Author’s Best Friend (For Now).

The revelation that struck me is that I was completely wrong in my recent actions. There are "stumble clubs" (of which one I belong to but rarely visit) that do the same thing except that the members are obligated to stumble everyone else in the club in reciprocation for having their page stumbled. It can be time-consuming and you can end up stumbling things you don't agree with, just for the sake of fulfilling your obligation.

Commenting here for a stumble incurs no obligation. If you feel obligated in some way, you can go ahead and do whatever you want — you can stumble one of my pages, add me to your Technorati favorites, add me to your feed reader, or link to my blog or a blog article in some way. The key is: You are not obligated to do so!

Leaving a comment for a stumble does two things. First, it provides me with a link to a page I might never go to otherwise and second, it provides a link to other readers that may be interested in your page. You can't do that with the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you have time on your hands, I recommend that you do something like this on your own blog (if you have one). I call this social networking without the networking infrastructure. It's more flexible and doesn't require a middleman to administer it.