StumbleUpon
Dec 2nd, 2004 by Aaron Louie
I know, this is probably old news by now, but I can’t resist commenting on a meme that I think has a lot of potential for a real impact on the way people find information. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that, with the click of a button, appears to send you to a random page. But it’s not just any random page. After you install StumbleUpon (available as a Firefox/Mozilla extension), you select from a list of about 500 topics you are interested in. When you click the Stumble! button, it matches those topics against the thousands of sites other people have reviewed using the “I like it!” and “Not-for-me” toolbar buttons. So what you get is highly targeted. In fact, after selecting my 30 or so topics, the first three links I got were Slashdot, HowStuffWorks, and New Scientist. In other words, dead on. I read Slashdot every day, subscribe to New Scientist, and am obsessed with finding out how stuff works.
So, as you surf the web, be it for work or play, you review the sites you like (or don’t like) with those toolbar buttons. And, on those days when you just want something new, you can use StumbleUpon to explore new sites in any of the topics you’ve chosen. There are some spyware concerns with StumbleUpon, but none more than Google Tooolbar. I’m not too worried about it — yet.
The thing that fascinates me about this tool is the great potential for a kind of “readers’ advisory” or Amazon Recommendations for the public Web. It also allows some degree of personal knowledge management, as you can add a review of any site you come across. Those reviews are shared with others, but you can also view the collection of all your reviews in one place. Even without this aspect, the signal-to-noise ratio has the potential to be very low, so information encountering and foraging behaviors can become very efficient.
One gripe, though… they don’t have a “Society > Libraries” topic, but I sent in a suggestion to have it added.