EMERGE is all for internet geekery and the ubiquity of Firefox Addons is our current obsession. Sure sure, this isn't really news that there are gizmos you can supplement your web browser with, but today friend of EMERGE, landscape architect, and mp3 blogger Rayna deNiord (check her ace site Modyfier) showed us Stumble Upon.

The extension for Firefox (and IE for any weirdos out there who haven't yet made the switch to Firefox) is essentially a recommendation engine. When you sign up, Stumble Upon gives you a fairly broad list of categories which you can check to indicate your interest. Then it adds a bar to your browser allowing you to "stumble" at will. The way it works is you click the stumble button and a site loads at random from your preselected areas of interest. You can indicate your like or dislike with a single click and as you use Stumble Upon, it's predictive qualities improve, driving more and more interesting stuff to your screen without entering a search query or browsing dozens of potential resources.

Granted, Stumble Upon is no good for doing targeted research. It's not as if you can choose "cheap flights between New York and Shanghai" as a category and get discount ticket offers pushed to you, but it makes for pretty compelling internet meandering.


We'd write more, but there's much much more stumbling to be done!

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