While I was researching other social bookmarking tools for the Quarter Past 12 Workshop this week, I came across the tool StumbleUpon.
From Wikipedia:
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.
I signed up for StumbleUpon to try its “StumbleUpon” feature – sort of like a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, but based on your web site preferences. The first step was telling StumbleUpon what subjects I was interested in. Oddly, they didn’t have any! I looked for education, teaching, CALL, Russian… but none of those can be selected in your preferences. I tried a different route, typing the word “Russian” into the StumbleUpon search then stumbling around Russian websites, but there wasn’t anything that caught my eye. I tried editing my preferences, selecting some music-related categories. I stumbled upon about five sites, and one of them was of interest.
Overall, I didn’t like the StumbleUpon feature. Maybe if I were to spend more time “liking” and “disliking” webpages on StumbleUpon I would have better luck. But since I already use (and love!) Delicious, I doubt that I would want to duplicate my bookmarks I have there. If you’re in the market for an online bookmarking service, and you’re starting from scratch, I would suggest exploring all the main sites, including Delicious and StumbleUpon, to find the one that works best for you.