Practicum - Sasha: Stumbling the News (6)

Considering the recent events going on regarding Osama bin Laden's death, I thought I would try out the powers of Stumbling in relation to this topic. StumbleUpon didn't disappoint. I narrowed my search topic to 'News (General)' and just sat back and stumbled from there. Of the 20+ websites I stumbled to, only 1 had a feature article not related to bin Laden, and only a couple had no mention of the news on their front page (In these situations, it was generally a world source of news, and you could narrow by region). I had read a couple of articles on everything going on, but StumbleUpon took me to a couple websites that looked at the current news in ways I hadn't thought about, but that were pretty interesting. One was a site that shows a map of places getting looked up in search engines, in order of popularity:
Obviously, New York and Washington were at the top of the list, but other places with things going on (because the world doesn't work with one-at-a-time news stories) were still reflected on the map.

Another site had basically the same information as other websites, but it was illustrated in a different visual format, which I found to be helpful. To me, a lot of news sites kind of throw a bunch of stuff at the viewer that all looks the same, so it's easy to miss what you're looking for. This representation with colors and font size was easy to navigate while still looking relatively clean and professional:


All in all, I think StumbleUpon was a really useful tool for getting a lot of different information (as well as perspectives) on the news at hand. While it would be less efficient for news that was less current or relevant (such as news among a niche group of people), it might take a little more finessing to get the information you're looking for. However, for big news like this, it was the perfect tool to keep up-to-date with what people were saying about this development.