Stumbling

My sister called me one day and said she'd been spending a lot of time stumbling that week. I had to admit I laughed. She's not necessarily a clumsy person, but I have saved her life a few times from passing cars, so that's what I imagined had been happening that past week.

She asked if I had been to www.stumbleupon.com and proceeded to explain to me the idea behind the website, I'll just quote them directly,

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 6 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

It sounded like a good idea, she said it was highly addicting, but at the TIME SINK red flag went up and I never thought further on the subject.

Until last week...

I needed a kick start. I remembered how she'd explained StumbleUpon and thought I'd give it a try, hoping that I'd see something that might give my creativity a boost. It was really easy to sign up and get started, I thought I'd walk you through the process.

First thing you'll do is sign up for an account with user name and password, then you'll be directed to pick your areas of interest. There are over 200 and some of them overlap, you'll start to notice. I just started clicking the boxes, here's a screen shot to prove it :)


I was almost done with the categories when this drop down window appeared. You can only choose 127 areas of interest, so be judicious in your selection :)


Once I'd made sure I liked my 127 selections, I hit the "Save Now & Stumble" button and away I went. This was the first page that showed up and I was a little confused. So I just started clicking the green squares, they'd pop up just a bit and the tune that was playing would change slightly. I realized it was probably a result of my interest in "music." Sure enough, I could create musical patterns just by popping up or flattening the green blocks. It was fun, but not the inspiration I was looking for at the moment (i.e. TIME SINK).


So in the upper left corner of the screen, there's a button that says, "Stumble." I figured that's the button I needed to push to move on. This page came up next, a result of my interest in nutrition I'm sure. I bet you could come up with a layout using this inspiration, but it didn't jump start me, although I did eat much healthier on Friday. :)

I pushed the "Stumble" button again, and it took me to a blog called "The Positivity Blog." It was at this point I realized I could definitely use this as a scrapbooking tool. Lots of amazing ideas from this blog alone could translate themselves into pages. AND there was a really cool graphic element on the page that I stashed away in my head to use one day as well. Very much worth the time spent.

I stumbled again and found a blog where they superimposed WWII photos onto modern-day ones of the exact same scene. Pretty interesting, but I decided to stumble one more time and found a website of creative advertisements, one of which I pulled off for your view pleasure. This is an entrance/exit for a train station in Switzerland (recognize it Hera?) where they've made life sized replica of a Mini Cooper that looks like a whole bunch of people are coming out of it. Clever!

Total time spent: less than 15 minutes.
Ideas: numerous.

StumbleUpon records all your stumbles, so if you want to go back you can easily find what you were looking for the next time. There are tutorials on how to use the application, I am sure I haven't even skimmed the surface.

Joy and I will be doing some stumbling this week and we're asking you to join us. While you're waiting for your July kits, we challenge you to use StumbleUpon to find some sort of inspiration and create a layout or card. Post it to gallery and link us here to share your work. We will be doing the same thing and posting our layouts at the end of the blogging week. We'll be highlighting some of your work on the last day as well!