Sunday, April 27, 2008

STUMBLE UPON



A recent post by Mark Evans on 'Four Reasons Why Blogging is Easy; Getting Traffic is Hard' lead me to a new website called Stumble Upon. I had heard that this website was making Google obsolete and I was curious to see why. Stumble Upon differs from Google because it allows you to discover web sites, videos, photos, blogs and more - based on your interests. Everything is submitted and rated by a community, thus taking the frustration out of having to search through website after website to find the one that is most applicable to your search. From a PR standpoint, Stumble Upon could change the way in which our information is received. We may no longer have the choice of what websites individuals visit, especially if community members are deciding what is important.

The video posted above provides a visual of Stumble Upon function.

2 comments:

Mattias said...

This sounds like an interesting addition to finding new sites. In today’s Social Media penetrated Web 2.0 world it seems like sharing and recommending files, sites and news is ever increasing. Friends posting videos on Facebook, people offering links at Del.icio.us or rating news at Digg, and now recommending/categorising websites at Stumble upon. I don’t think any of this will make Google obsolete, but rather complement regular searching.

From www.stumbleupon.com/about.html: “These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 5,059,000 other websurfers with interests similar to you.” I my mind, from a PR perspective, this gives me as a PR practitioner for a specific organisation the opportunity to plug my org website by recommending it in all kinds of relating categories so people ‘stumble upon it’ which they otherwise might not have done.

If it is worth putting in the effort or not I guess depends on how popular it gets. Will be interesting to see how it develops…

PR Tech Blogger said...

Thanks for your insight Mattias. I thought you take on how it could complement Google as apposed to making it obsolete was interesting. Maybe we just need to give it time. Google is such a large part of many internet users lives; it is hard to fathom its non-existence. If I may put my PR hat on, I could see how people could really take to stumble upon (SU). As many people seem to enjoy saving time and this is exactly what SU does. I think that as PR we need to be aware of the different changes implementing the internet and adapt and thus the goal of getting the #1 hit on Google may not matter in the future.