Venturing Outside the Neighborhood

A while back I wrote about the fact that despite the enormous size of the internet -- hell, enormous is a ridiculous understatement -- my internet neighborhood was pretty small. I'm a daily internet checker, and make the rounds of CHUD, Cool Tools, BikePortland, my email box, a few comics on Yahoo! news, Tom the Dancing Bug and the New York Times. Last year, when I was still playing videogames, I would've added ActionTrip and Gamespot to that list. Still pretty short.

Recently Cool Tools recommended StumbleUpon to me. If you don't already know, StumbleUpon is a site where you register, pick some interests from a list, then hit the Stumble! button that's been put onto your browser's toolbar. Stumbling lands you on a website that StumbleUpon thinks you'll find interesting based on the interests you picked.

It's fantastic. And a little frightening. Because StumbleUpon is basically a remote control for a TV with infinite channels. You can spend the rest of your life just stabbing that Stumble! button like a boobtube zombie at 3am when you want to go to bed but feel compelled to see if something good's on the next channel... and the next... and the next... . SU also asks you to give a thumbs up or thumbs down vote to each site it sends you to, by which input it refines its knowledge of your preferences.

Want a free online rhyming dictionary? It's out there. Or how about Greenpeace's animated diagram of "The Pacific Trash Vortex". Yep. Did you know there's a website where you upload a random file (music, picture, video, text) and it downloads to you a random file? Now you do.

Since Stumbling around the superfrigginhuge internet, I've bookmarked all sorts of interesting sites. I've laughed quite a few times at funny pictures, videos, or writings. I've even emailed friends links of things I thought they'd enjoy, like this. But it hasn't expanded my neighborhood at all. I haven't revisited any of the sites SU sent me to. I now know that they exist, and maybe someday I'll go back, but I'm pretty comfy in my little neighborhood.

And time is short.