Alltop and Content Aggregation

I’m not 100% sure what to file this under, or how practical it is in reality, but Alltop just intrigues me so much. I can see it has potential but I can’t quite wrap my head around the best way to make use of it. Alltop is a content aggregator and the creators explain that:

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.”

For example the Alltop page on leadership give you a good idea of what to expect.

http://leadership.alltop.com/

On the downside it seems to be very US-centric, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the greater scheme of things but I do like to know what’s going on in the UK and European training arenas

I think this one has to sit and settle with me for a while to give me a chance to think through whether it is something that helps me or something that distracts me…. and on the subject of distraction take a look at http://humor.alltop.com/ if you want to lose an hour or so.

By the way, one of the creators of Alltop is Guy Kawasaki who is considered by a lot of people to be one of the top modern thinkers on the subject of Marketing. He writes a consistently interesting blog which can be found here.

Guy Kawasaki Blog