By Kaitlin Villanova
I was recently searching the web when I stumbled upon StumbleUpon.com. This open-source web-browser plug-in allows for you to channel surf the web. When downloading this feature you are prompted to select interests/topics (examples: humor, writing, cooking, macs, fashion and tennis) and then from there the tool finds web pages based on the topics that you chose. There are millions of sites in the database, all submitted and recommended by other "stumblers."
The rating system is a similar model to the Pandora music site, where you type in an artist and it finds similar music that you can then rate on a the thumbs up or thumbs down system. This collaborative filtering of sites like Stumble and Pandora, use a automated process combining human opinions with machine learning of personal preference (pretty fascinating stuff!).
The Stumbleupon toolbar looks like this:
As you can see, the tool bar contains the Stumble! icon which send you to the next page of interest, the thumbs up thumbs down option, if you do rate a site thumbs up it is stored in the "Favorites" tab. You can easily pass the sites onto friends or colleagues with the "Send to" option. There is also a news, video, photo and even a wikipedia tab.
This recommendation system uses peer and social networking principals and includes a blogging feature. It's an easy way to keep up with the news and technology and find some pretty interesting sites. Here are a few of my favorites that I've stumbled upon lately..... (sorry for the pun I couldn't resist!)
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Technorati tags: StumbleUpon Open Source Pandora
In May of 2007 StumbleUpon was acquired by Ebay for $75 million. As of July 9 the site has roughly 3 million members.
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