It’s Everywhere You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Be
by Ruth Arnell
The last time I stumbled upon an awesome website by accident, my procrastination techniques underwent a kind of revolution the likes of which I thought were reserved only for people who regularly input zeros in place of ‘o’s. Now I stumble upon things on purpose, thanks to an electronic angel kiss called, literally, ‘StumbleUpon.’ My life will never be the same.
I’m not going to get into how it works, because I honestly have very little clue. What I can tell you about is how I found StumbleUpon (SU), how I set up my account, and how I started a web trend among my friends. Boo-yah.
First of all: I love the Firefox web browser. Not like mother/child love or captain/starship love. It’s really more like geek/Mac love if anything. One of the things I love most about Firefox is that it provides users with the ability to load up on customized themes, add-ons, skins, programs, etc. Three cheers for customization- users rule the web.
Fast forward to June 11, 2006 when I was rambling through the internet and found myself on the Firefox add-on page. It was there that I discovered an option to download a toolbar for a user-driven site recommendation program called StumbleUpon. After reading the description and wiping the tears of joy from my eyes, I downloaded it, entered my preferences, and set to ‘Stumbling,’ as it’s fondly referred to by its users.
By checking boxes beside a list of categories on my profile setup page, I set SU to take me to random websites voted as worth visiting by other Stumblers who’ve visited them and described them with those categories I’ve selected as being of interest to me. To view those pages all it takes from me is a click on the “Stumble” icon on my SU toolbar and away I go. And go. And go.
There are additional icons provided on the toolbar for voting on the sites I’m taken to, and icons that allow me to quickly send web addresses for the page I’m currently viewing. And should I find myself viewing a page not yet listed in the SU site directory, my voting will bring up a window allowing me to name, tag and describe the site, thereby making it immediately available for other users to StumbleUpon. Pretty cool, eh?
As for the ‘starting a web trend among my friends’ part, all that took to accomplish was blogging about SU, emailing about it, sending web links via my SU toolbar, and talking about it ad nauseum at every available opportunity. But once the wheels of curiosity were greased it was only a matter of days before I was being equally bombarded with links to amazing websites friends of mine had Stumbled on. I’ve chosen to interpret that bombardment as gratitude for exposing intense web awesomeness.
You’re welcome.
