Yet another way to waste time on the Internet.
The other day, I [finally] discovered StumbleUpon. This is yet another bookmarking service for people who spend a lot of time surfing the ‘Net. The gimmick for this one: you “Stumble” pages you like to add them to a database of pages. People can then randomly stumble upon the page by clicking a button in a StumbleUpon toolbar they install in their browser
Well, that’s the way I’ve been using it, anyway. For all I know, all the other bookmarking sites and services have the same functionality.
My Limited Experience with StumbleUpon
I installed the StumbleUpon toolbar the other day and spent an hour of my life stumbling upon seemingly random pages on the Internet that matched interests I indicated when signing up. I found a few very good pages, a few very bad pages, and a bunch of pages in between.
The magic was clicking that Stumble! button in the toolbar and not knowing what would appear next. Something I like? Stick around and check it out. Something I don’t like? Click Stumble! again. You could easily spend an entire day doing this, finding all kinds of cool yet unpopular Web pages buried in the depths of the Internet.
When you see a page you like, you can give it a thumbs up. A thumbs down goes to pages you don’t like. Easy.
StumbleUpon and the Blogosphere
StumbleUpon has been embraced by a number of bloggers. You can tell by the “Stumble It!” link that appears at the top or bottom of a post. I just added that this evening to this blog. It’s pretty simple to do in WordPress: just insert the following code where you want the link to appear:
There’s an icon that can appear with it, but since that didn’t go with the formatting of my post, I omitted it. I may add it sometime in the future, when I get around to adding icons for Digg, Technorati, and Delicious.
Do You Use StumbleUpon?
If so, don’t keep your experiences to youreself! Use the Comments link or form to share them with the rest of us. I’m especially interested in learning more about the benefits of this service. How does it stack up against the others? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not for Safari – shame, as it sounds fun.
Nathanael
I’m about as big a Mac fan as you can be, but there’s something about Safari that I just don’t like. I switched to Firefox about a year ago and haven’t looked back. I’ll try Safari, of course, when I write about it in my Leopard book. But it needs to have features like the ones I can get through Firefox extensions to make me switch back. We’ll see. Thanks for writing!
I think it’s probably one of the best ideas since all this internet fuzz begun.
I’ve been using it for a few months now, and it has really helped me finding sites I like, it reminds me that the web is almost (or actually) unlimited. I’ve have some stumbleupon addicting periods, jaja, but overall it’t the best way to surf the web, especially when you don’t know exactly where you want to go.
Hope it works for you.
I thumbed you up, by the way.
Besos.
Between the desire to click that StumbleUpon button when I should be working and the fact that I really didn’t LIKE the toolbar, I uninstalled the toolbar. Because of that, I haven’t used StumbleUpon since. But I do like the idea of random surfing, as long as I can limit the amount of time I do it.