Social Bookmarking with Stumble Upon

Do you ever just stare at a blank screen and wonder, what the heck should I do now? If so, then social book marking is probably something you've never heard of. Websites like delicious, digg and stumble upon take the idea of the internet bookmark, and combine it with a myspace-like community where you can share the things you find interesting with other people. They allow you to examine only the cream of the cop websites that attract people's attention. Hardly anyone has the time to sift through the wealth of information online, so trying to find the finest examples of a particular idea on the web can take forever. It's much easier for everyone when we combine our resources and make them easily available to each other. We enrich our culture and our minds by being exposed to a wide variety of very interesting things.

I use stumble upon as my social book marking tool. The main reason is that the stumble upon tool is integrated directly into my web browser, so I don't have to log into a website. All you do is download a very small plug-in for your web browser and pick a few interests to get you started. Then you click the "Stumble" button and you have instant gratification. By rating sites as sites you like or sites you don't like, you teach stumble upon about yourself and your stumbles become better. There's also a pretty active community of Stumblers that share thoughts and of course bookmarks through community groups that can be created by any member.

The downside of stumble upon is that to use it you must install the plug-in to your browser, so it makes it inconvenient to use on shared computers, and probably impossible on public computers with restricted access.

You can allow other stumble upon users to browse your stumbles and make friends with you. By adding someone to your friends list, you gain access to their stumbles while you stumble. The stumble upon community is diverse. Although I have noticed a disproportionate number of people from turkey and Kurdistan and other such places. One unique feature of the program is the ability to stumble by category or keyword. By choosing to stumble only videos, you have your own personalized TV programming. As you tube and Google video gain prominence and more content is made available thorough those sites and sties like them, the video stumble feature becomes more and more cool. So whether you're doing a particular kind of study or just want to waste time, stumble upon and all social bookmaking websites make your internet connection more valuable.