Most of the time I spend on the web has some purpose, be it working on various websites, researching something of interest or reading the news. Occassionally I do surf around aimlessly and when I’m in the mood for that, I’m usually following a ‘trail’ of interest. By this I mean, I may find someone’s comment interesting, and I end up visiting their website. From there, I might follow links to other “like minded” folk’s sites. I stumbled across an interesting tool today…StumbleUpon (I am not a member of this site) is a really neat concept loosely based on the web ring idea of a few years back. SU is different in several ways. Once you find a member with a certain interest, you can surf around visiting links posted by like-minded individuals. For one, you’re not really surfing through web pages dedicated to showcase an interest, you’re surfing through links to sites in a sort of “link library”. Members of the site “vote” on the links bumping them up or down which means the “link library” is democratically maintained. The thing is, SU is individual based, so you need to start with someone whose interests you wish to pursue. The thing I like about the site is that its RSS enabled, so look for RSS link feeds from SU characters as I come across them in the lower right of this site.

There have been sites dedicated to sharing interests by relationship for special interests like music for some time. Audioscribbler compiles your playlists (automatically via plugins to your music player software), MusicPlasma works like etherape (a linux program for displaying network connections) to graphically display relationships of music artists by genre (really cool site - found this one on Mike Francisco’s site). Recently I found a Mac-specific program called Goombah (wrapped around iTunes) which makes sharing your musical interests easier.