|
|
Students stumble upon new, innovative Web site |
|
|
|
Thursday, 24 April 2008 |
by JACQUELINE SCOTT
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
Popular Web sites for college students don’t just take the noun form, but rather the verb structure as well.
From Googling, Facebooking to...stumbling?
“Yo man, have you Stumbled today?” freshman undecided major Nathan A. Kelischek said to his
friends.
Kelischek
and his roommate, sophomore religious studies major Will S. Bryant,
spend hours at a time ‘stumbling’ on a recently discovered phenomenon,
StumbleUpon.com.
 Will S. Bryant, sophomore religious studies major and Nathan A. Kelischek, freshman undecided major, spend hour after hour navigating through StumbleUpon discovering new sites. Photo by Adam Dixon
|
With growing numbers of 4,943,963 Stumblers, the StumbleUpon toolbar allows users to find videos, photographs and Web sites based on their interests.
“It’s a custom-tailored randomization tool,” Dr. Norman E. Clark, associate professor of communication,
said. “Essentially, it’s a time-waster.”
Kelischek and Bryant heard of the browser application through friends and they have been stumbling
ever since.
“One day my friend said, ‘Dude, look at what I just found on Stumble. Check it out,’” Kelischek said. “I
wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Stumble? So, I added it to my computer and now it’s something
I do when I’m bored.”
Freshman undecided major Eli R. Samuels started the trend by passing it along to Kelischek and
Bryant.
“StumbleUpon really shows you how expansive the Internet is and how it connects people from all over
the planet,” Samuels said.
Kelischek and Bryant said they stumble in the library or between classes to find Web sites they
otherwise would have never found.
“The Internet these days is such a vast library and there’s no way to find it all,” Kelischek said.
Among the neat pages to stumble upon include Songza and Pandora Radio, though Bryant’s favorite
includes a “wingsuit” page.
“It [blew] my mind,” Bryant said. “People jump off of mountains in their wingsuits, going 120 mph with
the aerodynamics of a flying squirrel.”
Kelischek’s favorite stumbled upon page is a video of a Chinese Brahmin who can produce electricity
with his own body.
Most of the time, pages will be synced to match your interests.
“Once in a while you’ll find a Web site that you’re not really interested in,” Kelischek said. “You just
click the ‘Stumble’ button and keep stumbling. It’s really easy to get lost.”
Freshman recreation management major G. Will Davis heard about StumbleUpon.com through
Kelischek and Bryant, and said he frequently stays up until 4 a.m. stumbling. It’s always just one more
click.”
Davis stumbles as a cure for boredom, as a time-killer, and the desire to learn.
“It started as curiosity mixed with a desire to learn, and slowly but surely turned into a way of life,”
Davis said.
Davis said stumbling has provided him with more conversation material and general knowledge than
any other resource he’s ever encountered.
Clark said the Internet has changed the way people approach information, reading and writing.
“The old way used to be that you went to the library to browse books, find a topic with the same
interests, and look around for similar books,” Clark said. “That’s the same kind of thing that
StumbleUpon.com is doing, just at a higher-level in which it generates the information for you.”
“I have learned more from StumbleUpon.com than I’ve learned in college,” Davis said.
“It’s more helpful to have an efficient search engine rather than random stumbling,” Clark said.
Clark said StumbleUpon.com does not allow users to gain knowledge from random pages.
“I wonder sometimes that we have a whole lot of tools to find cool
things, but not a desire,” Clark said. “In the end, if you want to get
the knowledge, you’ll have to do some systematic research that goes
beyond the randomizing and countering of information.”
Trackback(0)
 |
|
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments