StumbleUpon Launches StumbleThru

StumbleUpon has released a new feature dubbed StumbleThru, described by the site as simply "A brand new way to explore personalized content within fast-growing sites!" In actuallity, the feature is much closer to a mechanism of viewing content only from sites that are considered 'high trust' or 'pre-approved' based on ratings received from the masses.

The sites currently on the list include Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress, The Onion, PBS, PhysOrg, CNN, BBC, and .gov and .edu domains, with more to be added in the future. Clicking any one of these links on the StumbleThru page restricts your toolbar and returns pages only from that domain.

I remarked on a similar recommendation made by Steve Rubel back in November:

By ranking sources that consistently generate interesting content in a 'Top Sources' tab next to the 'Top Users' tab, one could simultaneously reward the good sources (because more and more users will submit their content just by looking at the tab) and incentivize the inconsistently good sources to work harder and improve their content.

StumbleUpon has done exactly that. By rewarding the previously mentioned sites for content that is considered by the masses as providing value (interesting, entertaining, informative, etc) not only do they improve user experience by allowing users to limit pages by domain, but they also provide incentive for sites not on the list to follow standards set by sites on the list (in the hopes that they too will be added to the list someday).

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engtech, April 20, 2007

Hiya,

the link should be to wordpress.com, not wordpress.org

cheers

Brian, April 20, 2007

It would be nice if they had a stumble through for smaller sites as well that restricted it to just content on that site. That is, if I stumbled upon a pronetadvertising page and wanted to read other things by you that were "highly stumbled", I could just hit a button and be taken to another page on your site.

Bill Niece, April 20, 2007