Library clips

Stumble Upon is such an insightful service, basically a social bookmarking service with memedigging. But where the power lies is in fed discovery and personalisation.

By telling StumbleUpon your interests, and also by bookmarking, tagging, rating, reviewing pages it learns from you and can recommend fresh pages to you based on the community database.

So not only do you use it to submit/vote for pages and tag/review them for your collection, you also get to view other people’s collections.

This is where other services stop, ie. you have the benefit of discovering new stuff by manually looking at similar tags and similar people or subscribing to feeds.
But wouldn’t it be great if there was an added option that instead of slogging through lots and lots of links as a discovery method, you are just spoon fed links that are going to be relevant to your interests, “it’s like you’ve known me all my life”.

This is where StumbleUpon takes off, in that you can hit the Stumble button and it will show you a page that it thinks matches your current profile. From this random page (based on your attention), you can then bookmark/tag/rate/review it.
NOTE: don’t forget you can bookmark pages into the database yourself, it still works as a usual bookmarking service.

Just keep stumbling to be fed new pages, this is a new form of discovery…the next page you stumble may very well depend on the last page you stumbled, it’s all based on attention.

So not only do you bookmark pages, giving to the database, you take by stumbling pages that are already in the database…other social bookmark services don’t have this, you have to surf around yourself to find stuff.

The added bonus is that it is such a treat and exciting (and addictive), as you don’t know what your gonna get.

To learn more about it and how you can use it to drive traffic to your blog see the Dosh Dosh post, a must blog for earning your online keep.
eg. StumbleUpon footer in your blog post so people can Stumble your blog post, Stumbling your own posts, get a feed for your URL to track Stumble reviews.

BTW, there’s also a video version.

Auto-stumbling

I was thinking one step further, what about auto-stumbling.

Instead of me hitting the stumble button to see what I get, can’t I be auto-generated up to 10 bookmarks, and get these new bookmarks in my RSS Reader.

You could subscribe to a tag feed or a user feed or a search feed, but you can’t subscribe to an attention feed, and there are reasons for this…

The process is: after each Stumble you do an action (rate/review/tag), and based on this and your past history, the next stumble can be generated.
If you are auto-generated 10 Stumble’s, this means Stumble 2 isn’t taking into consideration the attention you gave to Stumble 1, and Stumble 3 isn’t taking into consideration the attention you gave to Stumble 1 and 2, and Stumble 4 isn’t taking into consideration the attention you gave to Stumble 1, 2 and 3 and so on.

But does this matter all that much, as long as the feed only gives you 10 at a time this is a small enough amount to still be relevant, in knowing it could be more relevant if you use it the usual way.

Within your RSS Reader, you could have the choice to click on the footer flare of each Stumble and action it (rate/review/tag). This would update the database and only when you have done this would the feed issue you a batch of another 10 Stumble’s.

I don’t know about all the technical aspects, but I like the idea of taking Stumble Upon one step further and into other applications. Maybe the auto-generated attention feed could just update you with one item at a time, this way it will work as optimal as usual.

This is a weird metaphor but here goes:
- surfing social bookmarks is spooning what you like and eating it (bookmarking it)
- clicking the Stumble button is being spoon fed bookmarks which you can choose to swallow (bookmark) or spit out if you don’t like it
- auto-stumbling would be like you have already ingested the bookmarks, and you’d have to throw-up the one’s you don’t like.

Read/Write Web posted on people networks, of which people tag themselves. You can then find profiles based on similar tags as you, Explode have this as their main feature, Yedda also have people tags but their main purpose is Q&A, Ziki is another service that has people tags but their main purpose is personal content management, then their is Technorati which is a blog engine, but they also have a directory feature to find others by how they tag their blog (kind of like tagging yourself, if your blog represents you).

Now we have Others Online, which I blogged about a while ago, basically it started as recommending and connecting with people based on your search terms and webpages you visit, but it also now recommends people that match your self tagged interests.

See the widget on their widget explanation page or on their blog, it’s impressive.

MyBlogBlog shows recent readers, Explode shows your friends, and OthersOnline shows people who are similar to you based on your tags…but I think it’s more than that.

Hover over a person and you get a link to:
- their tags (tags they use to describe themselves)
- their profile
- their identities eg. blog homepage
- chat, email, or add as a friend
One extra functionality you get on a user profile page is: find other profiles like this one.

Basically all these services are expert locators as you can discover people by tags, Ziki also allows you to search people’s content, so from searching a people network or searching people tags you can find an expert.

MyBlogLog is a community for bloggers, but they do lack people tags, the best thing it is for at the moment is to see who from the community is visiting your blog.
NOTE: you can read someone’s interests, but since these aren’t hyperlinked and aggregated for the community it is not a usuable expert locator, I think it will come soon.

MyBlogLog could easily incorporate the people tagging feature of Explode showing not only recent readers on the widget, but also explicit friends, and it could also show related people based on tags, ie. potential friends, like Others Online…MyBlogLog has the benefit of the community base.
It could also absorb the features of AutoRoll, essentially “people who visit your blog also visit these blogs”.

Come to think of it Ziki could so all this also, just give us a widget.

Related:
fringe contacts: people tagging
Microsoft Knowledge Network : expertise locator
The different ways of finding experts
Wink becomes a meta-expert locator

Streakr - the latest meta-network and also searches across networks.
See more meta-networks like SocialURL, mugshot and others.
See more meta-search networks such as Wink and others like Socialgrapes, Upscoop, etc…

del.icio.us tagdescriptions - each of your del.icio.us tags now has space for a description so you can explain the types of bookmarks you save within this tag…hmmm great idea for referencing.
eg. my tag “money” could have a description saying:
“this tag is about blogs and money, also see tag ‘ads’ which is about blogs and adverstising, all the bookmarks in the tag ‘ads’ are in the tag ‘money’, I’m using the tag ‘money’ as a parent type folder.
What about for adding tags like “rss+reader”?
What about a hyperlink and description for tag bundles?

Braincast - audio notes by dialing a number.
Retrieve these notes by email, RSS feed, or the web user space where you can manage and tag them.
[via WWD]

Spotback Rate Everything Widget - allows visitors to rate your blog posts from a footer button, top rated posts will appear in a sidebar widget, also listing recommendations.

mockatoo - create a collection list where you define the fields, kind of like a database, it reminds mew of Flexlists or ListRing, see more.

Twittermaps is a mashup that allows you to send posts about your current location.

According to the FAQ, just include the correct command and your current location will be viewable on the Twittermap.
eg. Going to the office. L:3000 6th Ave, New York.

Some ideas

What about getting the location of others.
eg. L steverubel

At the moment you can search the website to get this information via the search box, but what about on the go (and I don’t mean the mobile web, I mean SMS)…there’s also a search box here.

What about asking who of your friends and the people you follow are within 10 km radius of my location.
eg. get L…what about for the whole of Twitter, eg. getall L

Of course this is dependent on you always telling Twittermaps your location, other services actually work by GPS, see my SMS list post for more, especially Groovr and Jaiku.

[ADDED 19/03/07: Twittervision : real time map]