Alltop Needs More Tools March 29, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion, Tools.trackback
I’ve noticed a few mentions for Alltop lately. It is sort of a mashup of RSS feeds and a search directory. It has general categories for things like Culture and Geekery, with sub categories for Design, Gadgets, and so forth. Alltop is really handy to see the top sites for the categories in which you are interested.
Alltop is helpful in several ways. For one, it lets you find sources of influence. Finding who to follow, whose voice to listen to in the sea of information, is an exercise critical thinking, and Alltop helps by identifying those voices who are speaking with enough clarity for others to listen. Alltop also assists in bringing focus. By clicking on the link for a sub category, you find yourself with a simplified list of posts from each top site. Each item is a link to that specific article, blog, or tweet. As an RSS aggregator, it does a great job of reducing clutter.
Alltop could be even more helpful in a couple of ways. Sometimes even a plain listing of what is posted can be confusing and intimidating. Taking a look at the twitter collection, I find it takes a lot of time to read through everything just in case I might miss something. A tag cloud would be very helpful, collecting key words and displaying them by size. Sometimes I just want to get a sense for what people are talking about, and that would let me focus better on the specifics in which I might be interested.
Alltop could also open up to users and allow them to create their own categories, both private and shared. I’ve always thought the best suggestions came from word-of-mouth sources. Alltop could easily be a source for my own Alltop stories, the voices I listen to, the suggestions of other voices to which I should listen. I know there are other tools for providing exposure, like Digg, but those tend to get dominated by a few noisy contributors. Alltop brings the simplicity of Google to a sea of feeds, tweets, blogs, and so forth. I just want it to be even better.
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Just wanted to pop past and thank you for linking to my post on RSS feeds on The Edublogger. I’m glad you found the post useful. I will be interested in how Alltop develops over time.