Yesterday I sent an interesting page to all my StumbleUpon contacts – the first time since I use StumbleUpon when I actually “spam” everybody. In my defense, I had a good reason: Second|Brain has the most awesome contest I’ve ever encountered on the Web – and I’ve been around for more than 10 years.

Win a MacBook Air with Second|Brain and Mashable

Aside a short mention of the contest on their blog, I see no other Mashable involvement in this competition.

Besides, I know that the “crème” comes from Second|Brain and that to win a MacBook Air or any of the other prizes you need to register an account at Second|Brain and become an active member of the community.

Of course, the contest has other awesome prizes aside the “most wanted” MacBook Air, but any serious blogger dreams to grab the first prize. What can a writer do with the second prize – the gamer’s dream Xbox 360? Not much, unless the writer is also a parent who wants to surprise a child with this game console.

If you don’t already own an iPod Nano, this is the third prize. Now this is something even I want to have, although it has the functionality of a “cool gadget” and that’s it. But hey, it’s a cool thing, and after all… it is free.

Last but not least, there are 10 Amazon gift certificates in the contest, valued at $50 each – this is a good deal I think. There’s a lot to do with such a certificate – from buying books to other gifts. $50 doesn’t sound much, but when it doesn’t come out of your pocket it is a good deal.

Why Would You Join Second|Brain

Well, the cool prizes are tempting and all, but there are other reasons to join. Second|Brain is building the largest user-generated content library on the web. It will soon become popular – partially because this contest-powered promotion is already attracting many signups, but also because of the real value of the platform.

Imagine being able to organize all your content and all your bookmarks in one place. Now imagine being able to share everything at once with a large community of users. This means great exposure for your content and increased traffic to the original sources.

All new content appears on the Second|Brain landing page under “Recent Updates.” That’s the page with the largest number of hits, and as the community grows you can imagine that it will be in your best interest to submit new content as often as possible.

Personally I have accounts on every possible social bookmarking site I can think of, but many of these accounts are “sleeping.” Second|Brain supports most of the important bookmarking sites, hosted-blog platforms (like blogger and wordpress), flickr, YouTube and many other services, enabling you to access them all from one place. You can even post to twitter directly from Second|Brain!

So I made an account and you can see my page at http://miguelstil.secondbrain.com/

Because Second|Brain is one of Pamil Visions’ clients, I am not eligible to participate in the contest, but this doesn’t make the Second|Brain less valuable.

I spent a few hours today discovering the site and I am quite confident that this will become at least as popular as StumbleUpon.

Adding bookmarks to SB is so easy! I just installed a Firefox plugin and I can do this straight from my browser, pretty much as I do with the StumbleUpon toolbar – the only difference is that SB is faster, because it grabs the page title, page description and tags from the meta tags of the submitted page. Basically I just need to click and forget all about the rest.

Second|Brain is a startup. It still needs upgrades and to add more services. I bet I am not the only user who wants to see her Stumbles in her SB account.

Besides, I feel the need to communicate with the other uses, especially with those I follow. Right now SB doesn’t have such an interface. Sure I can post comments to what others bookmark and publish, but there is no way to directly communicate with my friends, and this, from a social networking perspective, is frustrating.

But aside these small “personal needs” I find Second|Brain quite interesting and I see great potential in this startup. Let me know what you think about it once you join. You should already have the invitations in your mailbox, especially if you are my readers and my friends.