Getting Started with StumbleUpon – Using the Toolbar (transcript)

This is the transcript of the video on using the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Pseudonym, a friend on StumbleUpon, once told me: “Coming to SU was *definitely* the best move I ever made in my life…the experience has given me ever more confidence in myself, in what is possible, in what is available, happening, knowable, fascinating, and just plain *fun* out there in cyberspace.”

This is the what the StumbleUpon toolbar looks like when you first download it…well, maybe not so squished, but I wanted it big enough to see.

Clicking on the stumble button will take you to a web page that someone else has already discovered and thumbed up. A number beside the SU picture, or icon, shows how many pages your friends have sent that you haven’t viewed yet. Only your friends can send pages for you to view, so you don’t have to worry about a stranger spamming you.

The thumbs are the most important buttons on your toolbar. Giving a page a thumb up means “I like it,” but in a broader term, it means “I like this type of page and would like to see more.” By the same token, giving a page a thumb down means “I don’t like pages like this. Please don’t send any more.”

The Send to button let’s you share the pages you’ve been visiting. You can send a page to anyone that you are mutual friends with or anyone who’s e-mail you have.

And the Comments button let’s you read what everyone else has said about a page, or add your own comments. SU refers to this button as both the comments and reviews button, depending on whether you have text turned on for your toolbar or not. Either way, it takes you to the same page.

The Channel area gives you several options to choose from. If you are only wanting to stumble news, or friends, or one of your interests, you can choose an option from the channel area. Clicking on the word All brings up a drop down list that let’s you choose any of your interests to stumble.

Favorites is another button that will get a lot of use. It takes you to your StumbleUpon blog, where you can see the websites you’ve commented on.

Friends takes you to the same page that the Friend’s tab does. You can see up to ten friends who are online, up to ten people that you are fans of, and up to ten people who are your fans.

Finally, Tools brings up a drop down menu…

…that looks like this. There are several sections on the tools menu that you’ll want to note. This is where you come to invite a friend to SU, and on the rare occasions that you need to sign out of StumbleUpon for some reason.

Let’s look at more at the Toolbar Options for now.

For the rest of this video, I will be focusing entirely on the Appearance tab. Under the configuration tab, you can set whether SU shows if someone has discovered the page and what the page rank is when you use a web search such as Google or Yahoo. The default is to show this information, but if you prefer not to get it, unclick the first box under Search.

Now that you know what the buttons on the toolbar do, it’s easy to create a toolbar that fits you.

There are several buttons I recommend keeping on your toolbar, in addition to the permanent Stumble and thumbs buttons.

The inbox puts a mailbox icon on your toolbar. If you have mail, the flag on the mailbox stands up. I love knowing when to check my inbox, without having to wait for an e-mail notice.

The Channel Menu puts everything from the channel area into a drop down menu, so it doesn’t take as much space on your toolbar. If you’d like, you still have the option of adding to the toolbar the channels that you use most.

Send to so that it’s easy to send web pages to your friends.

Reviews or Comments

Favorites, which gives you a fast way to get to your blog

And lastly, the Tag icon, which lets you easily add tags to any page. Once you’ve added tags to a page, the icon will turn to the right, and will turn from blue to red. Hovering over it will show the tags you’ve selected for that page.

One thing I LOVE about the StumbleUpon toolbar is that they let you add it to other toolbars. The easiest way to do this is to click on “Drag to position,” pull the SU toolbar in front of the Google toolbar, and click OK. You can also choose a different position from the drop down menu, but just as a note, all toolbars don’t play as nicely as SU and Google, so you may have to try several to get it to work.

Happy stumbling!

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