Stumbleupon the greater interweb
Published by on November 14th, 2007
I have never been one for the endless stream of “sites that show me sites” - you know, BoingBoing, Digg, etc. But over the past week or two I have been warming considerably to Stumbleupon.
The internet can be the biggest time-waster man has ever conceived. This can be a major problem for someone like me trying to get far too much accomplished each day, so over the past years I have managed a reasonable amount of self discipline in keeping interweb meandering down to a minimum.
I had a little mess around with Stumbleupon as a means to understand its potential for audio/video show promotion - both work and personal projects. It describes itself as: “Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.”
After signing up, you install a firefox toolbar, the most frequently used button provides you with a randomly selected site which fits into one of the broad subject category preferences you are requested to complete at registration. If you like what you have been taken to, you click a little “thumbs up” icon, if not, a “thumbs down”. This process enables Stumbleupon to learn your preferences with the aim of providing you with more stuff you are going to “thumbs up” in the future. In addition, the toolbar allows temporary focusing onto a single channel/category of content, so if for the next ten minutes you are only interested in seeing sites about Robotics, that’s all you will get.
It is the intelligence which is the key to the success of the service for me. I find I do not spend much time at all ’stumbling’ - just a few minutes here and there between tasks or on telephone hold hell. Because the system is increasingly intelligent, the reward for clicking the stumble button is usually high, which significantly lessens that “around the next corner there might be something great because I’ve just wasted the past half an hour” feeling which frustrated random surfing can traditionally generate. In addition, it helps to get out of the personal interbubbles (internet bubbles) we all live in and start exploring previously unknown quarters, but with a nice, comforting hand to guide us only to what we might like. The contents of my del.icio.us account has certainly swelled as a result of “stumbling”.
