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As midterms have come and gone, the average UNC Charlotte student has gotten used to spending vast amounts of time behind a computer screen, sucking in knowledge from professors over the past few months.
As the stress and anticipation mounts, every now and then, students simply need a distraction. StumbleUpon.com is just what the doctor ordered.
Founded in December 2001 by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd, StumbleUpon.com offers the Internet community the ability to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos.
Piggybacking off of Facebook’s success, StumbleUpon.com provides users a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social networking principles providing exactly what the user likes, while weeding out sites uninteresting to the user.
Upon your first visit to StumbleUpon.com you will be prompted to download the StumbleUpon toolbar. As with any toolbar, the main objective is to provide easy accessibility.
The next step in the process is perhaps the most critical, selecting your interests. StumbleUpon allows the user to select over 500 specifics of the user’s interest.
Ranging from broad topics such as news, entertainment, and sports, to narrow ones as such as fly-fishing and Japanese origami, users might have a more difficult time in selecting their interest than having a lack of specifics, like some other social networking sites currently have.
After you will have the ability to “Stumble!” as stated by the toolbar. By hitting the “Stumble!” button located on the toolbar, the application chooses which Web pages to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interest, as determined by the original questionnaire.
With StumbleUpon, not only will users have the ability to, “channel-surf” the Web, but they will also have the ability to select if they like or dislike the website, as well as rank the page.
Having used this toolbar application for just over a year now, I have expanded my Internet horizon, so to speak, and discovered new and interesting sites I would have never come across otherwise.
If you think you might be interested in adding this toolbar to your current Internet browser, there isn’t a need to worry about the Internet browser you are currently using, toolbar versions exist for Firefox and Internet Explorer. In addition, third party toolbars featuring the “Stumble!” application are popping up on Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.
As the stress and anticipation of midterms approaches, check out StumbleUpon.com to break the monotony of studying. It’s an application you might not soon forget.
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