ReadBurner Partners with NetVibes
Why let Google Reader have all the fun? My friend, Drew Olanoff, alerts me to the news that ReadBurner, known for showing news from the point of view of how many people have shared it using Google Reader’s Shared Items feature, have expanded. They’ve just released (20 minutes ago) a tie into NetVibes via the Ginger API, that will promote a similar kind of feature. The tab is already live on the ReadBurner site, so you can test it out directly.
As the aggregation space heats up, I’m excited that Drew, Adam, and the rest of the team are coming up with interesting new ideas at ReadBurner, and I wish them well.
What do you think? And who’s going to come out with smart filtering first?
Screen caps made with Skitch
Alltop- Encouraging the Mainstream
I’ve been thinking about Alltop. It’s a site built by Guy Kawasaki to help people find popular blogs on various topics. My blog and Twitter account show up in a few of these categories (thanks, Guy!), but what I’m interested in talking about are the topics that might appeal to the mainstream, and why I think Alltop deserves a little love.
What Is It
Alltop is an Internet magazine rack, fed by blogs. It is a site that aggregates summary content from multiple blogs into categories of interest. The source blogs feed information into Alltop by way of their RSS feed, but all of this plumbing is hidden away under the covers so that Alltop users don’t have to think about it.
Who Uses It
Alltop isn’t for you or me. It’s for friends and family and coworkers who aren’t yet surfing at the speed of light with Google Reader, or adding meta commentary via FriendFeed. It’s for our neighbor who still logs into AOL, or people who want to read a sampling of information without a lot of customization.
Why Should You Care
First, check out the various categories at Alltop. Is your blog a great representative of one of the categories? You might contact Guy and ask to be listed in that category. Second, this is another way to get people comfortable with using blogs as sources of information. Remember, you and I are IN this world. We forget that others still question the credibility of blogs.
What Comes Next
One of two things might come next to Alltop: advertising, or acquisition. If I’m Guy, I’m hoping more for B than A, but hey, if it pays for summer gas money, great. For the rest of us, it’s something to watch, as ANY opportunity to get the mainstream into our world is a good thing. YouTube and Hulu aren’t immediately the best thing for independent video producers, but the more people get used to watching content online, the more likely they are not to discriminate and try out new, independent products. Alltop works like that, in my estimation.
What’s Your Take
Have you looked at the various categories served in Alltop? Have you seen the representative blogs? What do you think?
The Web Version of You
What FriendFeed gives us here is a sense of how the web might see you (and I also mean “your business”). I don’t mean search. I mean the nature of the things you create. This list of places where you make media in different forms becomes the sum of your output, what you create. Your bitprint (like a footprint, but in digital).
What do you see there? What’s missing? Once we all have aggregated, what comes next?
