Formerly SpringBlog

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Have you Stumbled? Everyone's doing it..

StumbleUpon is an amazing website that has caused me to spend more time Stumbling than sleeping over the past few years. The website/app is an amazing piece of user collaboration and tagging that would make Clay Shirky and Peter Morville both smile and say "I told you so." If you have never heard of StumbleUpon (or if you never signed up even though your annoying roomate has been talking about it every day for the past year) then it is time for you to sign up and try it out! You won't be let down.


What StumbleUpon does is this:
  1. Records you personal interests: Do you like philosophy? Art? Music? Flash Games? Liberal Politics? Conservative Politics? Cartoons? Relationship Help? Pretty much anything you can think of.. put a check by it if it interests you!
  2. Start Stumbling: Click on the stumble button and you will be taken to a website that corresponds to one of the interests you checked. (All of this is done by user submission)
  3. Submit: Did you Google something interesting and think that others might enjoy reading it? Click the "Like" button on your StumbleUpon toolbar and fill out a review along with tags. Now, anyone who Stumbles on pages with those tags will come across the page you reviewed! You are submitting to the Stumble process, and thousands of others do every day.
This is user collaboration at its best. Every time you click the Stumble button, you will be taken to a site that interests you (about 90% of the time from my experience). It is amazingly easy to get lost in the vast web of information once you begin Stumbling. You go from link to link constantly clicking "Stumble" to go to a new article.

Shirky's social-semantic web ideas parallel StumbleUpons entire idea: Articles YOU choose are articles other people read, just tag them!

Along with Shirky, Morville would be happy to see StumbleUpon's ability to constantly retrieve information that the user finds engaging and interesting. I have Stumble'd upon many pages I've turned into ideas and papers for classes, and all with barely doing any searching.

StumbleUpon is a great way to find all sorts of information and multimedia that you are interested in, but it does have a down side. With the ability to click ONE button and have an unlimited number of websites that you really do find extremely interesting, you can lose a lot of time. And I mean a LOT. Don't believe me? Try it out yourself!

1 comment:

  1. Although the gems on this site are sometimes rare, but almost everything I find is interesting or humorous, it is still something that I would recommend to many of my friends. It is quite addicting once you start. Better than Pringles. Just one great example of how people don't need to be aware of each other beforehand in order to still connect through shared and common interests.

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