Alltop

I’ve been a fan of Alltop – “We’ve got all the top stories covered all the time” – from early on and I admit that having this site listed on the social media page there has helped. Alltop describes itself as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. It’s an amazing resource for finding blogs from a great range of topics.

I had an example just today of how helpful Alltop can be in that regard.

I was responding to a friend who is thinking of setting up a travel blog. I wanted to send her some examples of quality travel blogs and – this is not an area of specialization for me – the only one I could think of, off the top of my head, was Sheila Scarborough’s excellent Family Travel Logue.

Then the penny dropped. Alltop, of course! Assuming they had a travel section, which I quickly discovered that indeed they did. I counted 56 sites listed on the Alltop travel page. Authors included kitchen expose guy Anthony Bourdain who writes about travel and food, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, the FareCompare guy Rick Seaney, the dynamic Travelling Mamas and the inimitable Sheila Scarborough as previously mentioned.

Back in November last year there were, according to Alltop co-founder Guy Kawasaki, some 350 topics on the site overall. There are no doubt plenty more now. And there is an email update system so that fans like me or the just plain interested can receive direct notification of new topics when they are launched.

Yesterday on Thinking Home Business I wrote about the new web content aggregator site Alltop and observed that it is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to get a quick, interesting overview of current online coverage of their favorite topic. That post was focused on the Small Business category on Alltop.

This deswalsh.com site is listed in the Social Media section of Alltop.

One commenter on my post yesterday asked why I would not just use a feed reader. My reply was that it was a case of complementarity, not either/or.

The feeds on my reader (or rather, readers) are chosen by me. That’s an advantage, in that I can avoid having information coming in that is of no interest, or an unproductive distraction. It’s also a drawback, because I know that:

there are lots of sites I don’t know about, or don’t know enough about, to automatically include them in my feed reader
life would be truly dull if there were no surprises

The selection of sites featured on Alltop is made by others. So I get to be better informed than if I were left to my own reader-stuffing devices and I get to be more entertained than if I had to be solely responsible for surprising myself.

To be honest, initially I had been a bit wary of the site after reading Jeremiah Owyang’s contentious – and contested – post, in which he labeled the Alltop project a “gimmick site with marketing flair”.

And Community Guy Jake McKee has an interesting point when he argues that Alltop, with its lack of login, RSS and commenting, could be called an “anti-social media site“.

Jake also says that Alltop is “fast, focused and useful”. I agree. And, also like Jake, I am happy to have my site included. Thanks Guy.