Imagine yourself wandering along through the internet jungle, minding your own business, checking out the virtual flora and fauna and wham — you discover a gem hidden amongst all the clutter.

Exciting, isn’t it? StumbleUpon thinks so and that’s why they’re about to release their latest advertising arena which they call Paid Discovery. Now, when you think about it, Paid Discovery is kind of an oxymoron. The word “discovery” implies that you found it accidentally and yet “paid” implies that someone put it there on purpose. Still, that’s the concept behind the new service that could be quite advantageous for creative marketers.

There’s too much information out there and not enough time in the day, so why not let your industry peers help you sort through the clutter!

That’s the pitch for LinkedIn’s new social news aggregator LinkedIn Today.  Set up newspaper style, the program delivers “top” stories for the industries LinkedIn has associated with your professional profile. The stories are a mix of items shared by your network, your peers and “professionals” (ie, everyone else) and mostly they appear to be gleaned from Twitter.

At a glance, there appears to be a lot of options and levels of information that you can narrow down yourself with a variety of check boxes. However, a lot of what you’ll find here is just more noise and clutter. For example, some stories have a small blue banner with a number. Click this and you’ll see a list of people who shared this link on Twitter. You could use this list to find new people to follow on Twitter, so that’s helpful.