If you look at this graphic I copied, you’ll see a few titles that get your eyebrow raised. I found the experiment to be interesting, and even more interesting when I picked a topic material that wasn’t really my thing. It’s amazing how just the titles got me thinking about my own blog and what I could do better.

Just for fun, I grabbed the most recent titles from my blog. Here they are:

• The Location Game – Over on OPENForum
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Review
• How Social Media Can Power Your Business – Kitchen Table Talks
• Points of Contact
• The Social Media Pie – over on OPEN Forum
• How I Use Mindmapping to Write
• Cubicle Farming
• New Job New You – a Book Review
• The Writing Practice
• Switch- A Book Review
• The Beginning – Kitchen Table Talks
• How NOT to Help Haiti
• How Systems Thwart Service
• Your Farmer List
• Living In Google Wave
• What is Your Pop-Up Store
• Get Seen- Do It Now
• Represented by the APB Speaker’s Bureau
• More Fun Than Competition
• Business Stripped Bare – Book Review
• Do One Thing Very Well
• How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers
• The Future Is Evidently Blurry
• A Customer Aware World
• Experiment- 30 Days of Bing
• Deepen Your Networks
• New Sponsor – Search Engine Strategies NYC
• Are You Ready for Fun

There are four book reviews. There are four “announcement/promotion” type posts. There are seven video posts.

Of the titles, I think I did okay. I think they could be better. I’m sure Brian would tell me I could do better.

So, what do you think? How do YOU stack up? Does looking at other people’s titles and ideas help you think about your blog?

Can you see the value in comparisons, or, as I talk about in More Fun Than Competition, are you just competing with yourself?

If your blog was the next Wired / BusinessWeek / FastCompany / whatever-for-your-industry, how would you rate it?

I just added a few more things to my own personal Alltop. It’s a feature Guy Kawasaki added to his service so that I can pick and choose which of his many aggregated sources I want to check in on easily. Mine has a lot of marketing and PR sources in it. Yours can have whatever you like, maybe poker? (Don’t forget to check out my Dad’s poker blog, if you like poker.)

Just browsing My Alltop this morning gave me three new tweaks to my own marketing strategies. I added the ideas to an Evernote file for later.

I still use Google Reader and RSS for several hundred other sources, but Alltop is a good way to get a fast glance and pick up some ideas. Have you tried it?

Tonight, for instance, I got curious about search engine optimization (SEO). I thought about googling the term, but realized that would dump me into lots of commercial products, software, and worse. So, I thought about Alltop. I typed in http://seo.alltop.com, and it popped up all the various search blogs out there. Instantly, I had what I needed.

I spoke with Guy about this recently, just how much it’s changed the way I blog, and the way I research. We thought about how else it might empower bloggers, and here’s what we came up with:

Top 10 Ways Alltop Powers Bloggers

1. Keep track of what your competitors are writing about. Alltop displays the last five stories of over one-hundred sites and blogs for topics ranging from adoption to zoology with 400 topics in between>

2. Examine the site design of bloggers in your category by clicking through on headlines and seeing their sites. For example, if you’re a mommy blogger, you can see what hundreds of mommy blogs look like at Moms.alltop.

3. Get more traffic by getting added to an Alltop topic. Go here to sign up.

4. Grab blogging tips by reading what expert bloggers like CopyBlogger and ProBlogger are saying at Blogging.alltop.

5. Stay on top of what’s happening in SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media, and corporate blogs.

6. Stay on top of what the big personalities like Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Tara Hunt, and Dave Winer are saying at Egos.alltop.

7. Compare the quality of your headlines to other bloggers’ headlines. If your headlines don’t stand out in Alltop, they won’t in any feed reader.

8. Keep track of what’s happening on Twitter by monitoring the top one hundred Twitter personalities on Twitterati.alltop

9. Find story ideas from other areas. For example, you can find a study about psychology and then blog about how people can apply it to marketing.

10. Provide fresh content to your readers with no hassle by installing an Alltop widget in your sidebar. These widgets deliver the five most popular stories of the day from 400 topics. (This one was one of Guy’s. I haven’t installed one yet. Have you?)

So that’s our list. There are all kinds of other things I use it for, like finding out where I should be commenting more, and discovering what I might want more information about. It hasn’t let me down yet, and with the passionate team Guy has working on keeping the Internet’s best magazine rack well stocked, I feel like it’s not going to stop serving me up stuff to read any time soon.

Are you using Alltop in other strategic ways? Have you used it as a way to share your stuff with less tech-centric friends or business colleagues? What else should be on my list?

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

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?

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?

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.