Checking on a late Saturday night I have seen that Google UK have officially tried to go “green” by going black. Some of you may remember Google black a while ago created by persons outside Google. On the homepage of Google they have called it “Earth Hour” to help increase awareness to the environment.

In all fairness they have specified that by turning the pixels black it does not lower power consumption but the idea is nice if a year behind the original idea.

I found this on Digital point from User Sweetfunny and have tested it and this does produce a different result to that of the main Toolbar.

For those who want to see the new values in their Toolbar:

On Windows XP

Navigate to C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc

Open the file HOSTS with Notepad, then at the very bottom on a new line put:

72.14.255.17 toolbarqueries.google.com

Save and close, you will now be able to browse with the new PR values.

As far as I can tell this is not the final PR output but one of many data centers that are updating. I should give you an indication of where things are heading.

1. The most recent change in Stumbleupon are the thumbnails of the sites that have been reviewed or stumbled. Previously they were screen shots of the entire page, which I had personally started to get use to, now the system is taking a snapshot of the main image on the page – this will now require more thought to attract attention.

2. Not too long ago there was quite a lot of fuss about a Stumbleupon user who got banned by posting threatening messages on other user’s walls. I think every SEO has probably come across these trolls before, the feature called “Flag this” now allows you to give a positive or negative rating to a users review. I have used this in both a positive and negative way but am yet to see any real positive responses.

3. Flickr given special treatment – when you come across a Flickr stumble in the future look on the right of the screen where the user whom discovered the page’s information will be. You will see the addition of “Stumble Thru Flickr.com” under “Share this with a friend”. In all honestly I’m not sure if this is new but I certainly haven’t noticed before.

4. Previously you could block users entirely in Stumbleupon if they were rude or for whatever other reason. If you look at your friends page and look at the bottom right of the page then you will notice a box where you can “unblock” blocked users, not entirely sure why you would want to do this but there you go. Also above that box you can search for friends by email address too, I was not aware of this either!

5. If you scroll down to the bottom of any Stumbleupon page you will see a link labelled “Directory” – if you click on this it will produce a list of alphabetic letters. From this you can find every member of StumbleUpon. If you look down the list you see that there is a small box to the left of your name, some are white, some have bits of blue, some have complete blue and some have complete green. I have looked through this and I can only determine this to be your Stumbleupon rank – Green being a power user or activity on Stumbleupon. Another thought is that the green represents being online, and the blue is based on reputation, I came to this assumption by looking at the number of pages liked, reviews etc. If anyone has any additional information on this I will update the post if it can be backed up.

And before people start saying “They’re not secret!” not everyone knows as much as you! Some people are beginners!

EDIT – I had some feedback from Howardtheduck on SU: 

You are right in #5 , Blue fills up as you get “fans” It turns all green if you become a “sponsor”. See, they are all green :

http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumblethru.php