Maria’s Guides

• The case against Twitter
  On CNET.com.
  (tags: twitter Internet opinion)
• In defense of Twitter
  Also on CNET.com.
  (tags: twitter social opinion)
• How to Protect Your Pictures and Photos on the Internet
  Some tips for protecting your images from theft. On OfZenAndComputing.com
  (tags: images copyright photos)

Yet another way to waste time on the Internet.

The other day, I [finally] discovered StumbleUpon. This is yet another bookmarking service for people who spend a lot of time surfing the ‘Net. The gimmick for this one: you “Stumble” pages you like to add them to a database of pages. People can then randomly stumble upon the page by clicking a button in a StumbleUpon toolbar they install in their browser

Well, that’s the way I’ve been using it, anyway. For all I know, all the other bookmarking sites and services have the same functionality.

My Limited Experience with StumbleUpon

I installed the StumbleUpon toolbar the other day and spent an hour of my life stumbling upon seemingly random pages on the Internet that matched interests I indicated when signing up. I found a few very good pages, a few very bad pages, and a bunch of pages in between.

The magic was clicking that Stumble! button in the toolbar and not knowing what would appear next. Something I like? Stick around and check it out. Something I don’t like? Click Stumble! again. You could easily spend an entire day doing this, finding all kinds of cool yet unpopular Web pages buried in the depths of the Internet.

When you see a page you like, you can give it a thumbs up. A thumbs down goes to pages you don’t like. Easy.

StumbleUpon and the Blogosphere

StumbleUpon has been embraced by a number of bloggers. You can tell by the “Stumble It!” link that appears at the top or bottom of a post. I just added that this evening to this blog. It’s pretty simple to do in WordPress: just insert the following code where you want the link to appear:

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">Stumble it!</a>

There’s an icon that can appear with it, but since that didn’t go with the formatting of my post, I omitted it. I may add it sometime in the future, when I get around to adding icons for Digg, Technorati, and Delicious.

Do You Use StumbleUpon?

If so, don’t keep your experiences to youreself! Use the Comments link or form to share them with the rest of us. I’m especially interested in learning more about the benefits of this service. How does it stack up against the others? Inquiring minds want to know.