StumbleUpon isn’t very much like any social bookmarking site out there. And, in a way, that is good. If you are relatively new to web surfing, or even if you feel like you are going to the same 5 web sites every day, StumbleUpon is the perfect remedy.

There are several features that differentiate StumbleUpon from its fellow bookmarking sites. The big difference is pretty obvious from its name: You “stumble upon” new, fresh sites. No need to do a Google search or look for a particular category or tag, all you do is install the free StumbleUpon toolbar and restart your browser. The toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox (and should work with Firefox derivatives like Flock). Once installed, the toolbar will direct you to the StumbleUpon registration page so you can get yourself a free login to StumbleUpon. Register, pick some categories, and you are ready to stumble!

To start stumbling you really don’t need to know anything about the toolbar, the web site, or anything else. You simply click the Stumble! button and you are directed to a site that StumbleUpon thinks you might like. That’s it! If it ‘read your mind’ and you love the page you landed on, just give it a thumbs-up. Your rating will be recorded on the site, so you can get to it later, and you have contributed to the community nature by giving the site a quick review. Whenever you are ready to move on, you can click the stumble button again and away you go.

It’s easy to lose an hour or two (or five) just stumbling from one site to the next. You’ll find that every once and a while, StumbleUpon will send you to a SU page to give you a tip or expose you to another feature. The process is educational and fun, and almost relaxing actually. But, if you are ready to get serious with StumbleUpon, it can help you out through its more advanced features.

Moving from left to right across the default toolbar, after the thumbs-up/thumbs-down, you have a Send to button that lets you email other SU members or email recipients a link to the page you are looking at. If you do send a link to someone who isn’t registered to SU, the email they will get will be in HTML and will also encourage them to sign up to SU.

Next, you should have a search box, to narrow what sort of sites SU will send you too, based on terms that you enter. This is good if you are looking for something, but don’t know exactly where to look. Try it with a term like sunset as a hint. After typing in your search term, hit ENTER and the SU button will be updated to reflect the search-term stumble. To the right of search are pre-defined channels that SU supports, like everything, pictures, video, and stumblethrough. This last term is specific — you can pick certain large web sites and SU will constrain its stumble results to that domain.

Finally, you have a pull-down menu to select a specific category (out of the list you made when you signed up) or other types of categories. After that you have a link to your favorites (more on this in a bit), your friends page, and a catch-all tools pull-down menu that lets you adjust account settings, modify your toolbar or report a site you stumbled across as “adult” or “spam”.

You will probably spend most of your time interacting with the SU toolbar. Almost all of the functionality you are likely to need can be accessed through the bar quickly and easily. However, SU also has a content-rich web site with full community integration that is worthy of exploration as well. In fact, this is one of the reasons why people use a social bookmarking tool — for the social aspect!

You will notice that on every page StumbleUpon sends you to, you should be able to go to a review page for that URL that has discussion and details. If you stumble on a page that, you’re not sure what it’s good for, this is a good place to start looking. Also, every SU site shows who made the initial suggestion.. if you think the page is especially fantastic (say for example a gorgeous picture) you can follow the SU user link to see what else they have suggested or have marked as their favorites.

Speaking of favorites and suggestions, you have complete control over your own profile! Just click on Favorites and you will be redirected to your account page, where you can see the pages you liked, the pages you discovered, and also pages you blogged. This last topic is another community feature — SU will maintain a blog page for you, so you can give your friends a URL (mine is here) that they can use to see what you have been up to. You can even add text blog entries, and include some HTML if you want to have an embedded image or other item. StumbleUpon then provides you a RSS Feed for you (or your friends) to keep up on blog entries & reviews, or favorites.

So, if you are stuck looking for something in those series of tubes we call the Internet and want someone else to do the driving, give StumbleUpon a try. It’s quick, easy, and I can guarantee you will find several new web pages or entire sites that are right up your alley. You will wonder why you never found them before.