Alltop Launches Version Two
I’m a big fan of Alltop. If you’re looking for great new reading material, besides my Rockstars page, I’d REALLY recommend Alltop. It’s the new magazine rack for the Internet. I love that it’s so easy to use. I love that you can find lots of great niches topics there. autism.alltop.com , dads.alltop.com, that kind of stuff.
If you’re in marketing and PR and you need to reach someone in a specific community, you could find the folks you need to reach at Alltop. It’s not just for fun. It’s a tool you should be using. Looking to start new content for a niche? Pay attention to who else Alltop has already found for you.
Congrats to Guy Kawasaki and the team.
Alltop Launches Frienderati to Help You Find FriendFeed Friends
Using AllTop’s new Frienderati page might help you find Becky McCray, a small town business professional who focuses on how the web can help out small business owners, especially those in rural areas. You might learn from browsing Frienderati that Becky sees things differently than others. And because it’s a feed from FriendFeed, you’ll see what she posts for pictures, how she uses Twitter, and whatever else she’s attached to the service to track.
She’s one of a whole gaggle of interesting people you might add as friends in FriendFeed once you peruse Guy Kawasaki’s new Alltop page, Frienderati.
Why do I like the project? Because it’s a way to help new folks coming onto the web to see things in a simple interface before they choose to go deeper. Have you looked at the project? What do you think?
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?
Alltop of My Game
Earlier this morning, Pistachio blogged about Alltop, some kind of new “read it all in one place” site. This afternoon, Brian Solis points it out, too. Only this time, he clues me in to the fact that my blog is part of their egos section. Ego. Hmm.
I feel honored that they included my name in their list. I feel weird that the area is called “egos,” but I get that it doesn’t exactly fit the rest of the taxonomy any other way. I wish they had more than five women on their list of egos, but I imagine it’s the kind of thing that grows/changes over time.
What Pistachio said to me that’s cool about the project is that it’s like RSS for the masses, meaning that it’s a good way to understand the value of aggregated news. I didn’t look around a lot. If there was a roll-your-own section, that’d be even hotter.
What do you think of Alltop? Do you like it? How about as a tool for people not yet tuned in to making their own RSS reader sing for them?
Thanks, Alltop, for including me.
