Stumblin’ Around Part 01

OK, so per my mother’s first comment request, I’m going to talk a little about Stumble Upon.

I’m going to warn you right now though. When you’re up channel surfing the Internet until 4am on a weeknight because you have to push that button one more time, don’t blame me.

So first for the uninitiated, what is Stumbleup0n? Is it a website? Is it a toolbar? Is it a Firefox add-on? Is it a social networking site? Well, truth is, it sort of defies classifications and labels. There’s not much else like it that I’ve found. It’s similar in function to Delicious (aka del.icio.us).  Wikipedia defines Stumbleupon as:

StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.

I like to describe it simply as “It lets you channel surf the web.” Just like channel surfing on the TV, you keep clicking, looking for something better on another channel. The thing is with the TV eventually you run out of channels and your back to where you started. With the Internet, you don’t run out of channels.

Essentially, you create a user account where you can enter some personalized information and get detailed if you want. You can even have a picture, so it feels like a Facebook/Myspace type thing at first. Then there is a toolbar that you can download for Firefox, and there used to be one for Internet Explorer (I’m not sure if IE8 supports Stumble or not). If your using Chrome or Opera or even Safari, I’m not sure. I have gotten Stumble to work in Opera, but by far it works the best using Firefox. Either way, you need the toolbar to appreciate the full effects of Stumbling. So just get Firefox already, it’s free.

So the tool bar you install will be below your bookmark toolbar in Firefox and just above the tab section:

When you get started setting up your account the site will ask you to choose your interests. There is a long list of categories broken down into sub-categories. You’ll select each sub topic that your’e interested in and StumbleUpon will present you with pages in that category when you click the “Stumble” button .

As of now, you can only choose 127 different topics, so choose carefully (you can always go back and change them later).

Now the idea behind Stumbleupon is simple. When your online and you find a website that you like or want to share, you click the “I Like It” thumbs up icon .

If the page is a new submission then it will ask you to tag it, or in other words, give the page descriptive words about its content. You can use pretty much any words for tags (separated by commas) but they only let you use five total tags. You can also right a review and categorize the page if you want. If the page has already been submitted to the database it will simply note that you “like it” and add it to your listed favorites on your profile.

Once you “thumbs up” a page it is added to your “Favorites” section. On your Stumbleupon profile all of the pages that you “like” are listed for you or any of your “friends” or “fans” to see. One of the reasons I started using StumbleUpon was as an alternative to del.icio.us. It allows you to bookmark sites that you can then access from any web browser. So if your not at your home computer you can still pull up sites that you may not remember the URL to get to.

If you decide after all that it’s not a favorite or you don’t want it to be seen or listed on your profile, then it can be deleted be clicking the “Delete” link on your list of favorites.

Now when you hit the Stumble button a page is retrieved from the database of submissions that matches up to the categories you’ve selected as interests. I’m sure there’s more to it than this, but without trying to reverse engineer the whole thing, that’s the just of it. Sometimes you will get a page that one of your friends has submitted. Generally when you click Stumble the Stumbleupon user that submitted the page will appear in the Stumble bar. You can then click on the user button to visit their profile and see what other pages they like and learn more about them.

If you are given a page that you don’t like for whatever reason you can click the “Thumbs Down” button with a few options in the drop down arrow.

First, you can simply decide that the page is “Not for you”.  You can also report the page as spam, duplicate content (meaning you’ve seen the page or a the same content on another page), or you can choose to “Block Website”. This last option will keep any page from the website that you are on from being displayed by a click of your Stumble button.

There are a lot of other advanced features that make StumbleUpon really addictive. I’ll talk about those in a future blog. But for now go ahead and download the toolbar and sign up for an account. Did I mention that it’s free? Play with it and if you run across something you have a question about, drop me a line (leave a comment).

Until next time I leave you with this and wish you happy Stumbling.

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