Monday, September 15, 2008

StumbleUpon

For this exercise I looked at a site called StumbleUpon, which was placed second in the Bookmarking category behind Delicious. Basically what you do is select topics that you're interested in, hit the Stumble button and it brings up websites that fit the topics you've chosen. You can then give the sites the thumbs up or thumbs down depending on whether you liked it or not, share the page with friends, see what other people have enjoyed etc. I put a selection of topics and had a few goes to see what it came up with, and out of about six 'stumbles' I got perhaps 4 quite interesting sites and 2 I didn't like or think were relevant. It's quite a neat idea as it brings up one site at a time, rather than a search engine where you get pages of hits to trawl through. However I don't think it's particularly effective for searching given that you let someone else choose for you in a sense, but quite good perhaps to find unexpected things and also of course to be able to share your discoveries with other people. I don't think it would be very useful in a library context though!

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