If you’ve been to this site before, and you don’t know me personally, you probably got here via StumbleUpon.

SU has long been my favorite Firefox plugin, but I’ve come to love it even more because it drives a good portion of the traffic to my website. If you don’t already have it, by all means download StumbleUpon now.

In an effort to turn an already great product into something even better, the folks at SU continue adding great functionality to their service. For example: StumbleVideo.

If you’re using SU to surf, then you are likely stumbling onto great videos already - mixed in with the other content you receive. But if you’re interested in just stumbling through the best videos on the web, make StumbleVideo your destination of choice.

StumbleVideo’s interface is as uncluttered and clean as possible. As you’re watching a video, the controls and page content dim to black, so as to keep from being a distraction. You can hit the “Stumble” button at any time to find the next great video, click thumbs up or down to rate what you’re watching, see how many others liked or disliked it and even share your favorite videos with friends via a simple button click.

You’re going to like this. So start Stumbling!

My iPod currently has 12Gb of music and 15Gb of movies/television shows stored on it. It is as much a video player for me as it is a music player. But getting those videos onto my iPod from sources outside iTunes can be a bit tricky. Converting .avis or .movs into iPod-compatible MPEG4 video is old news, thanks to tools like Videora. But how about converting YouTube videos or other embedded movie files from the web into iPod format?

Interested? Sure you are.

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Back in my day, we used to have to scour the internet for hours in search of a freeware app or some shareware trial software that could convert audio files between formats. We prized…prized! those hand-coded conversion tools that turned our .avi’s into .mpg’s or Flash .flv files.Clandestine image formats? Markup language text? If you wanted it, you found some niche application to get it converted. Sure! It was hard work. But it built character. And we were grateful. Our parents worked overtime to provide for us so we could have audio tracks in .ogg format and .doc files converted to Acrobat-ready .pdf’s.

Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

But now. Now..the kids have Zamzar. And Zamzar can do nearly any conversion you can think of - online.

Without downloading anything, Zamzar lets users upload document, image, audio or video files (up to 100Mb) to be converted online into an alternative format. The newly-converted file is then emailed to the user.

The service is, as the best of these things are, free. It is also, as most of these things seem to be, still a beta version. But don’t let the “beta” fool you - it works just fine.

Now, while you go convert your 300-page doctoral thesis into a convenient .pdf, I’m going to go chase some kids off my lawn.

Buying holiday gifts is hard. At least, it is for me.I don’t know if it’s because I’m a guy or because I’m just naturally insensitive, but picking gifts for loved ones is not a skill I’ve mastered. The kicker, though, is that my family and friends are great gifters - and the presents I get from them are almost always excellent.

A typical Christmas morning for me goes something like this: I open a gift and excitedly unwrap a pack of Dinosaurs Attack! trading cards. Awesome! Then I watch someone unwrap the gift I gave them: banana-scented socks. Crap!

So in order to overcome my annual gift-giving incompetence, this year I’m getting some help - from Imagini.

I’m a visual person by nature, so Imagini is a great way to find things. It presents you with a series of questions, which you answer as best you can by clicking the most appropriate photo. These queries narrow down the field of gifts for the specific person you have in mind.

(How Imagini decides what gifts it ultimately displays is beyond me. I suspect it is some sort of holiday witchcraft.)

In the end, you get a list of cool gift ideas tailored (in theory) to the tastes of your loved one. Even if you don’t buy anything presented on the site, it’s a great way to spark some ideas or just get you pointed in the right direction.

The site is based in the UK, so most everything is priced in pounds sterling. If you’re located outside the UK, you might want to find an alternative source for ordering your items. But that shouldn’t stop you from putting Imagini to work for you.

Happy Holidays!