Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com) lets you explore the Web through your interests, based on
how other Web users tag content. Users select categories of interest and bookmark URLs in those
categories. You can then choose to “stumble” through the Web using the category of your choice. The
service will randomly show you a Web site that has been submitted to that category.
Note
Some Internet commentators refer to this taxonomy—the categorization of Web content based on labels
and tags supplied by Web users—as a folksonomy—a way of categorizing content that the community
creates, as opposed to hierarchical categorization by a central body.
StumbleUpon allows users to explore the Web based on the taxonomy applied by other users. Instead of
looking to search engines for relevance, users are instead appealing to the knowledge of a community.
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) started life as a real-time blog search engine but has since
evolved to incorporate other forms of user-generated content, including images and videos. According to
Technorati’s Web site, Technorati tracked over 112 million blogs and 250 million pieces of tagged social
media as of early 2008. [3] Internationally it is the blog aggregator and an essential tool for anyone who
operates online.
Technorati’s core is a tag-based index that allows users to conduct searches on topics that interest them.
Contributors are able to tag their individual posts, and the better a post is tagged, the better its chance of
being picked up by a relevant search. Instead of contributors being separated into categories, the content
of each individual post is indexed. Technorati not only searches the blogs of subscribed members but also
operates as a normal search engine.
Technorati can also be used to keep tabs on Internet buzz, both to monitor online reputation and to see
what trends are emerging.