Stumbling On

‘Serendipity’.   There’s a useful word.  It’s probably one that you use all the time – and your friends love you for it!  (Or maybe they just regard you as a bit of a smarty-boots!)

All right!  We can save you the trouble of reaching down your dusty old Oxford English Dictionary.  Serendipity means an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident!

And, believe it or not, someone has based a very successful international multimillion-dollar internet business on this very concept.   No it’s not serendipity.com (although someone will no doubt have registered that name, long long ago)  It is called ‘StumbleUpon’ and you have probably signed up already.  If not, you should try it.  It works, sort of, like this.

If your best mate is totally nuts about Manchester United, and you come across a really interesting reference to Man U on the internet, you might tell him about it or email him with a web-link to the article in question.  Or if your cousin Flo collects Womble dolls, and you spot a funny story about Wombles, you might send her a text message, drawing her attention to the story.

The idea behind StumbleUpon is that, if lots of people know what things really interest you, they can all tell you about all the things they have come across in your particular areas of interest.  So your exposure to happy accidental discoveries is multiplied many times over!  There are in fact about 15 million members of StumbleUpon.com out there to help you find those happy discoveries.

You will find links to StumbleUpon and lots of other useful social networking sites in the WebWatch2000 social media networking category (http://www.webwatch2000.com/portal/social-media-networks/)