Stumblers!

I heard about this site in a Business quiz program, http://www.stumbleupon.com/. Just curious; checked out what it is all about. It's one more creative idea in Web 2.0 space.

The funda is, Internet is filled with lot of interesting web sites and web pages. And we don't even see 1% of Internet. Stumble Upon is a creative idea to expose interesting web sites to users. The users of this tool are called 'Stumblers'.  The site offers a toolbar that is to be installed with our browsers. It has a "Stumble Upon" button in its toolbar; while clicking, it will show a random page of your interests. While We browse through the web, we can vote  for any site we visit (Say "I like it" or "I don't like it"). The Stumble upon maintains these preferences.

It is a random search of web pages in our interests. The results thrown by the 'stumble upon' surprises us all the time. It quite addictive too and we may lose count of hours we spend in Internet. We can tweak our preferences with stumble upon at any time based on the web results with voting utility.

How it works?

While registering for the site, it takes our fields of interest. Similarly lot of people share their interests with the site. Then it will create a pool of people who share common interests. And the site takes subjective votes for the web sites from the users. And as a Stumbler suggest a site in the any field say 'Science', it will keep showing the page to all other Stumblers and refine its notion about the site's subjective quality based on users votes. This iteration takes a long time, needs lot of users. That is now possible with Web 2.0. But after sometime, Stumble upon will create a huge repository of interesting web sites in any subject. 

'Stumbling' will not replace searching. It can't answer to any question in any field. It suggests interesting quality web sites in your field in a random manner. 'Stumble upon' takes us in a quick tour of Internet to lot of places where we would not have gone before.

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