I find myself more and more often stumbling while on the internet. Stumbling is a recent website that allows you simply click a button (after downloading the tool bar) that will bring you to a random website. As you use stumble more the website starts to recognize what you're interested in. You can either like or dislike the website it's brought you to, by again simply pressing a button. If you choose to like a site Stumble Upon saves it in your favorites, and categorizes your internet interests. What stumbling's best feature seems to be is that it doesn't bring up sites everyone knows about, but rather bizarre almost unknown websites. It has certainly broadened my scope of what's on the internet, and the possibilities of what it can become. It seems that the internet is now evolving into a completely customizable resource in which search engines are no longer a generic display of what might fit the search, but more so what will fit ourselves and our own personal interests.
Stumble Upon isn't the online website that allows for this personal connection with the internet. Pandora and Last fm two website radio stations that work very much like stumbling. Again the viewer is able to either like or dislike the music that is being played through a customized station and reacts accordingly. With this new type of internet browsing I'm becoming more absorbed by the vast amounts of information on the internet that before I was completely unaware of. I can't help but wonder how this is reconstructing my idea of what the internet can do. No longer do I have to search for interesting links by word of mouth, or even know the exact website I want. These websites do the work for me. Am I becoming even lazier, to the point in which looking something up requires me to only touch a button? This new type of browsing also seems to be wasting more and more of my time, because it's so easy, and most certainly because it really does find exactly what I like. These websites feed my addiction for easy access to information, and of wasting time. What bothers me most is that the sites really do know what I'll like and not like, and I can't help but think that we are coming into an of technology in which the internet knows more about ourselves than we do.
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Good choice of post. Interesting, and telling us about something we might not know of. But you want your links to be directly to the thing you're saying. So I would have put the link to Stumbled Upon to Stumble Upon. Also, have other people written about it? Could you have found an interview with the founder? Something to make it meatier? Given us an example of something it directed you to?
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