I never heard about StumbleUpon before, but with its addition to the eBay family, I had to try it out. I strongly advice you not to do so for reasons that will become clear very soon .

StumbleUpon is a sort of social bookmarking site - we’ve seen that with del.icio.us, digg, etcetera. However, StumbleUpon adds a twist in that it lets you select topics you’re interested in, and then provides you with a browser toolbar that has a big “Stumble!” button which drops you at a random site belonging to one of the topics you selected. This has kept me busy for the better part of the day, and is the basis for my (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) advice not to succumb to this time-killer (time killer? I don’t even have time!).

Among others, StumbleUpon has toured me along gems like some christian fundamentalist jerk being pissed off by Cheney, Hans Bethe reminiscing on good old times and teaching a bit of quantum mechanics at age 93, a perspective on the size of our li’l planet, and other fun stuff.

Brushing all the questions aside about what’s cool about StumbleUpon and why the heck eBay bought it, it did provide me (and still does, I fear - there goes my spare time, sigh) with a tour of some lesser-known nooks and crannies of the internet, away from the gray Google/Wikipedia monoculture where one seems to land all the time these days when using mainstream search engines.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Stuff on the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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