What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a way to mindlessly surf the internet guided by your friends and the topics you are interested in. StumbleUpon is a great way to find new content and kill time when you’re bored.
How to get started on StumbleUpon
- Head over to http://www.stumbleupon.com/ and create an account.
- Once you’re logged in, start by telling StumbleUpon what topics you’re interested in.
- Add some friends. You can find them by having StumbleUpon search your email address book or you can ask your friends what their usernames are or check their profiles on other sites for links to their StumbleUpon profiles. (You can find me here.)
- If you’re using Firefox as your browser (which I highly recommend), download the StumbleUpon toolbar. (If you don’t like your toolbar area being too cluttered up, it’s easy to turn turn toolbars on and off as you want to use them by right clicking in the toolbar area.)
- Start stumbling. Press the “Stumble” button at the left end of the toolbar to get to a new site. Use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to tell StumbleUpon whether you want to see more sites like that in the future or not.
How to get the most out of StumbleUpon
- I do most of my stumbling via Channels. My favorite channels: People I’ve Subscribed To (icon has two people, one in an orange shirt and one in a yellow shirt) which gives you sites based on your interests that your friends have already thumbed up and Search (magnifying glass icon) which gives you sites that other StumbleUpon users like you have thumbed up and match a search term you’re interested in, if you want to see what people are saying about a certain topic I find this more useful than a Google search.
- StumbleUpon learns what you like from what you thumb up. If a friend asks you to give a thumbs up to a site and you don’t want to see more pages like that, don’t give it a thumbs up.
- The more you put into the system in terms of telling it what you like and adding new sites that you like, the more you will get out of the system. The recommendation engine gets smarter as you participate more. If you’re a website developer, it will do you no good to only submit your own sites because StumbleUpon won’t have any info on what other sites you like so it won’t be able to find other users like you who might also like your site.
From the Delcious website:
What is Delicious?
Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
Delicious is the bookmarking tool I’ve been seeking for years now. (It’s been around for years too but I tend to be a late adopter to social networking services.) I regularly access the internet from my computer at home or from one of two different computers at work. I’ve been in search of a way to effectively synchronize my bookmarks between all three of those machines.
A typical situation for me is this: late afternoon, all my work is done but the receptionist left early so I need to man the phones. Between calls I tend to surf the net a bit. I get off at 5pm and typically about 4:50pm I’ll come across an awesome site that I want to continue exploring when I get home. Recently I’ve been using StumbleUpon to help me find those pages again when I get home but often enough they aren’t really the right type of site to be sharing on StumbleUpon.
That’s where Delicious kicks in. Delicious is perfect for bookmarking any type of site that you’d typically bookmark in your browser, including items that you don’t want to share in the social bookmarking environment via private bookmarks.
I’ve found that to use any sort of social bookmarking or social networking site effectively, you need the Firefox add-on to go with it so I downloaded the Delicious add-on. This adds several items to your Firefox window: a menu, a toolbar, a few buttons in your navigation bar, and a sidebar.
I turned off the toolbar since it took up too much screen real estate and I also turned off my standard Firefox bookmarks toolbar since I’ll be using Delicious to access my bookmarks from now on. (View > Toolbars to turn them on and off.)
Delicious Navigation Bar Icons
The navigation bar icons serve the following functions from left to right:
- access your Delicious homepage
- open and shut the sidebar
- add new items to your bookmarks or update your notes or tags on existing bookmarks
Delicious Sidebar
The sidebar is the other essential feature you need to be using.
At the top of the sidebar you see a search box. That search box lets you search your bookmarks by title or by any tags you’ve added to it.
Below the search box you have a section of tags. Tags are like the folders you would have organized your bookmarks in if you were still using browser based bookmarking but have the advantage that you can add multiple tags per item (similar to labels in Gmail if you’re familiar with those). The more tags you add the better but you don’t need to have everything tagged right away to be able to take advantage of Delicious. Just tag as you go.
The bottom section of the sidebar is your bookmarks. I have mine sorted by Most Visited so that it’s easy to pop over to my favorite sites. If you choose a tag from the section above, only the bookmarks that have that tag will show in this bottom section. If you type something in the search box (even a few letters) it will narrow your list of bookmarks down to only the items that fit that search.
The contents of your sidebar will update even as you make changes to it from different computers although so far it appears to me that your Most Visited items are not cumulative between machines.
It’s easy to get started on Delicious because you can import all of your existing browser based bookmarks and it will tag them based on the names of all the folders those items are nested in. Everything you import this way starts out as a private bookmark but you can change items to public as you like.
I’m loving Delicious so far, I’ve barely started using it and already I can’t imagine how I lived without it.
Firefox is my browser of choice. One of the best things about Firefox is the huge variety of add-ons available to improve your browsing experience.
I like the keep things fairly simple so there are three add-ons that I consider absolute must haves and while I’ve tried a selection of others they eventually got disabled because they were more clutter than they were useful.
TimeTracker
TimeTracker is going to shock you back to reality. It creates a little clock in the lower right hand corner of your browser that keeps track of the time you actively spend browsing the internet. If you’re anything like me, you’ll likely discover that what you thought was just a few minutes here and there actually add up to many hours a day. It’s a real eye opener and I now try to limit my online time to no more than 8 hours a day as an absolute maximum.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool that helps you discover new websites that are relevant to you. The Firefox toolbar is an absolute essential because it makes it so easy and simple to stumble and rate sites. If I’m interested in a topic but I’m not sure specifically what I’m looking to learn about it then I love to use the StumbleUpon search feature so I can see what other users thought were the greatest sites related to that topic.
Tab Mix Plus
Tab Mix Plus is an add-on that will finally give you the option to duplicate a tab. I can’t tell you how many times I desired that option before I found this add-on. It includes a variety of other tab management functions, but duplication is the essential.
What are your essentials?
