Stumbling My Way Through Cyberspace
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Odds 'n Ends
Stumbling My Way Through Cyberspace.
One of the last things on earth I ever want to do is add a toolbar to my browser. I have enough of the things, and oh how I HATE the fact you have to pay careful attention when installing programs these days because it seems more than half of my installs has an "add the Yahoo toolbar" box with the install checked by default. Curses!
All that changed when I decided to give StumbleUpon a chance. After all, one can uninstall a toolbar as I’ve done several times to get that blasted yahoo toolbar off my browser. I joined the site, installed the toolbar, didn’t read much for instructions. I noted that there was a "Stumble" button all the way to the left. I clicked it, and suddenly a whole world began to open up that I never knew existed. I have never been much of a surfer out of frustration over having to step through so much crap to get to a good site. Google is a great tool for finding specific info, but it is sorely lacking in a methodology to insure quality of sites.
StumbleUpon changed ALL that for me. I have found the most amazing sites since I installed and started stumbling. The way it works is, much like Digg or Delicio.us, thousands of users submit sites they think are uber cool. Still, weeding through THEIR website to find the cool stuff you’re looking for can be a frustrating pain at times. The stumble toolbar makes it super easy to just kick back, relax and be blown away by amazing sites that others have found. StumbleUpon leads you through the process by asking you to pick the kind of sites you’re looking for with a page of simple checkboxes, then it’s just a matter of hitting that stumble button.
There are so many internet gimmicks out there, I was certainly skeptical, but StumbleUpon represents a paradigm shift for me in how I view and use the world wide web. It has turned what I once viewed as a chore into a brand new experience, one that brings joy and amazement. I’ve been on the internet for 13 years now, and finally, the world wide web is something I actually love as a casual experience. I still use it to get stuff done, I still use google—I really couldn’t do without it, but now I have something else that has changed how I view the internet in a pretty profound way.
Tags: internet, stumble upon
One Response to “Stumbling My Way Through Cyberspace”
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DigitalTerrain.info » Blog Archive » Learning Photoshop Online Says:
June 20th, 2008 at 7:50 pm[...] aside, I wrote this article about StumbleUpon and I am really starting to love this sites methodology, especially the toolbar. Do yourself a [...]
