Serendipity35

I didn't stumble upon the social bookmarking site called StumbleUpon until last week when Tim & I noticed a lot of visitors coming to this blog from that site. One of their registered users bookmarked Serendipity35 and then about 100 others that day clicked to us.

It lets you discover and share interesting webpages with a single click. You look around topics (channels) and stumble upon some new stuff. It works within the Firefox browser, adding a toolbar with icons like these:

Click to see a new recommended website
Click to save a page and recommend it to others.
Click if the page you are on isn't interesting or useful
Click to see other people who like a page and the page reviews
Click to view your own favorite pages and reviews
Click to discover new pages your friends like

Sounds like del.icio.us, right? StumbleUpon claims that it has more users than del.icio.us. (1,375,696 users vs. 1 million currently)

It started out in late 2001, but it hit its stride this year when it picked up some venture capital and moved from Canada to Silicon Valley.

About the site, the company says:

"de.licio.us is focused on organizing information, whereas our focus is personalized content discovery. We help people find something of interest or make a connection with someone with similar tastes. With respect to our demographics, nearly half our user base is outside the US, more than a third over the age of 35, and they are viewing sites in every conceivable genre - from Economics to Humor, Gardening to Photography. So essentially StumbleUpon appeals to anyone who is looking to discover great new content and who wants a personalized tool that is easy to use."

There are some easy uses of social bookmarking sites for teachers: create a page of site links that you want to use in class that can travel with you - especially useful if you use different computers/different classrooms. You can give your students the link so that they can use your page of links. Create a page of links for that presentation you're taking on the road. And if you can get others to collaborate on a topic, the list can grow.

Anyone can look at bookmarks on del.icio.us that are tagged with a topic - for example "web 2.0" - for StumbleUpon you can check out popular sites that are getting buzz but if you search a topic - try "writing" - and you'll get not sites but "stumblers" - people who have tagged that word.

Both sites can be visited anonymously, but to really use them, you need to create an account. Yes, that's another username & password but if you're just reading (and not contributing), you're being soooo Web 1.0.