Sunday, April 17, 2005

Stumbling Around

I recently came across something called StumbleUpon which is kind of a neat tool which tries to figure out what websites you might like by putting a toolbar in your browser that lets you rate any site you visit by either clicking "I Like It" or "Not for Me". Then there's the "Stumble!" button which takes you to a random site that may or may not interest you. When you register (it's free) it asks you to check off things that interest you. So clicking the stumble button does give you plenty of interesting sites. This is a real cool feature if you're just surfing around at lunchtime or something. You just click the stumble button and it will take you to some neat site. If it doesn't interest you click 'not for me' and hit stumble to go to the next. I've found some really neat sites in the past couple of days using this system. These are sites I never would have found any other way.
StumbleUpon also lets you communicate with others that build the same kind of interest tree that you have, but I haven't taken advantage of this social networking aspect of the tool yet. Not that I ever will. But the basic idea of taking you to sites that somewhat match your interest and letting you fine tune that interest list by rating the site is a really interesting one. Definitely something that should be checked out.

0 comments: