Went's Wonderful Web - Stumble Upon

One of the great blessings of the Internet is the sheer size and variety of great content that is out there.  This is also one of the problems, how do you find the great content, that you would be interested in, that you know is out there, waiting for you to visit it?

Stumble Upon is a website that aims to help solve this problem. You visit their homepage and you can log in using your Facebook profile or create a new profile specifically for Stumble Upon. After you've signed up, you'll be asked to add interests. You *MUST* do this if you want to get any benefit from the site. There are a lot of interests to choose from, so you might need half an hour or so to go through them all, but the process is worth the time.

Once you've added your interests, you're all set, you can return to the homepage and you'll find a collection of sites that you can go visit, personally tailored to your interests. You can also download an add-on for your browser, which was my preference. Whenever I'm bored online, I click the Stumble button in my browser and a new page will be presented to me. I have found many of my favourite sites using this button, if I particularly like/dislike a page, I can click a button to approve/disapprove of it. I don't do that particularly often, but your mileage may vary. If no one else has recommended the site, you get asked to fill out a little form describing the site - takes less than a minute if you choose to do it.

There are also apps for your phone but I prefer using the web browser as the sites look better. You have to be logged in to use the site so your stumbles are being recorded, they keep them on file in your history which you can check out on the main page. So if you're looking for perfect privacy online, this application isn't for you.

I've used StumbleUpon for years now and remain very pleased with it, it's found so many sites for me that were worth seeing and it's only a few seconds of my time if the site isn't worth seeing :). As the sites that you visit are tailored to your interests, a lot of them are going to appeal.

So, what are you waiting for? Give it a try! 

This post was originally made in May 2014, it got targeted by some stupid bots and got thousands of 'hits'. That actually annoys me because I prefer my stats to be relatively accurate, so I've delted the original post and am re-publishing it here.