WebProNews

Discovering content may be 2008's big tech achievement

Long ago a little old lady asked, "Where's the beef?" These days, Hollywood writers have a beef with the studios, and people turned to the web to discover entertainment in greater numbers.

When people do that discovery, they have some options, but tops on the list has to be StumbleUpon, the browser add-on for Firefox and IE. Now owned by eBay, StumbleUpon serves 4.3 million members, the company's Dave Feller told WebProNews in a phone interview.

The demand for discovery should be pushed by a couple of trends. Feller said the continued growth on online content makes it difficult for people to filter through everything that's out there.

Also, more people have been heading online for entertainment, probably nudged there in part by the writer strike taking place in Hollywood. If and when it ends, a need and desire for discovery of great online content should persist.

Plenty of online companies want to get content to those visitors, from Google and Yahoo all the way down to the newest blogger. Discovery of relevant content, and in this case the StumbleUpon model, serves that well in Feller's opinion.

In a way, our chat with Feller and recounting the basic approach of StumbleUpon - people categorizing and voting on submitted content - resembled what Reuters wants to do with its OpenCalais project. That project may serve as a catalyst to the promise of a semantic web, one where concepts find content better than keywords alone.

StumbleUpon may be fulfilling that role today. The random approach of Stumbling isn't the same as a focused search, of course, but on a general topic level, like boxing or comics, StumbleUpon pulls up content based on those concepts.

We certainly don't have a beef with that.