The Journal

Issue date: 11/8/07 Section: Opinion/Editorial

As wasting time on the Internet gradually becomes the American pastime of the new millennium, new innovations are affecting the ways the information superhighway can work for you.

Since Google burst onto the scene and redefined the search engine - and nearly the entire Internet in the process - it's become easy to see how one concept can make the Internet more useful and accessible. One of the newest ideas causing a buzz akin to Google's viral impact is a new Web-surfing tool called StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is a free, downloadable toolbar that sits at the top of the browser window and effectively allows users to "channel-surf" the Internet. With StumbleUpon, users can visit a random generation of pages relating to a list of pre-selected interests. Over time, the toolbar learns what users like and don't like, returning exponentially better results.

When the toolbar is downloaded, users can select up to 127 interests from a list, and when you hit the "Stumble" button, StumbleUpon will choose from related pages recommended by other "Stumblers." After viewing the page, users can select a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to tell the program whether to send similar recommendations in the future. In addition, the toolbar also offers buttons with the option to filter the response to get only videos, news stories, photos or Wikipedia pages. Because of the unique and growing StumbleUpon community of users, the system will never go stale and send the same results over and over.

What this could mean for Internet users is a virtual end to all boredom, as StumbleUpon supplies an endless amount of games, blogs and miscellany. The service supplies a literally endless lineup of pages you will almost definitely be interested in but have probably never heard of. If you like something you see, you can bookmark it in your browser for later, allowing you to make an expansive personal library out of your favorite parts of the Internet.

In the same way that Google returns perfect results almost every time, StumbleUpon has mastered the art of the recommendation and made the internet even more useful while personalizing it in the process.

In my first hour with StumbleUpon in my Firefox browser, I went to six Web sites, five of which were unbelievably related to my interests and unbelievably interesting. I was hooked. It was strange how it gave me several pages in a row that were exactly what I would have wanted. Two months later, my list of bookmarked pages now has to be divided into sub-folders.

Continued...

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