The Internet is a wonderful thing…there’s so much information out there, available for free. Of course, not all of it is good information, and it can be a pain to sift through a bunch of garbage written solely for SEO purposes and content written by people who have no idea what they are talking about just to get to the good stuff.
That’s where Alltop comes in. Alltop bills itself as an “online magazine rack.” They aggregate the RSS feeds from different websites and blogs and organize them into specific topics. Each feed is handpicked by Alltop, so you get crap-free content about topics you’re interested in. Plus, Alltop will show you the first paragraph of each story so that you can decide if you’re interested enough to go to the website or not.
Hand-picked content is great, but how do the folks at Alltop know which sources of content are best for such a diverse range of topics? ‘They cover everything from social media to oceanography! That’s where the magic of Twitter comes in, allowing them to collect expert advice on what feeds to include. The result is that each topic has a page full of information you actually want to read, updated every hour.
Of course, if you desire more customization, Alltop will also let you create your own page. Just sign up, then browse the pre-existing Alltop topic pages to find feeds to add to your page. This is great if you’re looking for information about a specific topic and you want a narrower focus than regular Alltop pages provide. In the example above, I created a page on gardening and backpacking that’s focused 0n my area.
Alltop’s user interface is attractive and easy to use. No complaints there. The concept of filtering and aggregating news on specific topics is not exactly new, but they do a fine job of it. As far as usefulness is concerned, the range of topics Alltop covers means it’s basically the swiss army knife of online information. Anything that can help you find a local street food vendor for lunch, keep up on industry news during the day, plan your next vacation and then choose a recipe for dinner and wine to go with it is obviously a useful tool.
And yes, of course I’m aware that you can set up pages on specific topics yourself using RSS feeds. Sometimes, it’s just easier to let other people do the work for you.
What do you think of Alltop?
Our Rating of AllTop
Categories:web
Tool of the Day: AllTop – News Aggregation Made Easy http://ow.ly/aBZ0
http://bit.ly/hdYhm
via @addthis – check out this “online magazine rack”, pretty cool
http://bit.ly/hdYhm
via @addthis – check out this "online magazine rack", pretty cool
RT @benhofer: http://bit.ly/hdYhm via @addthis – check out this “online magazine rack”, pretty cool
RT @benhofer: http://bit.ly/hdYhm via @addthis – check out this "online magazine rack", pretty cool
@benhofer that alltop link is sweet (http://bit.ly/hdYhm), led me to the audio archive of Smalls Jazz Club (massive!): http://bit.ly/5lNgL
AllTop – News Aggregation Made Easy: http://bit.ly/hdYhm
[UsefulTools]
The article is ver good. Write please more
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day: AllTop – News Aggregation Made Easy http://ow.ly/aBZ0
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day: AllTop – News Aggregation Made Easy http://ow.ly/aBZ0
RT @usefultools Tool of the Day: AllTop – News Aggregation Made Easy http://ow.ly/aBZ0
[...] became popular, people have tried to tame it, map it and classify it. Aggregation sites like AllTop present a curated selection of blogs on various subjects, while Technorati long ago declared itself [...]