New Alltop Blog “Dashboard”

There is another resource both for finding what’s happening in the blogosphere and for potentially seeking out incoming links. Web guru Guy Kawasaki recently launched Alltop, with the slogan, “We’ve got all the top stories covered, all the time.”

Frankly, when I first saw the site I didn’t get its brilliance in its simplicity. I shrugged it off as yet another directory in a world or far too many blog directories. But since then, a couple things have happened.

I submitted a couple links to my blog feeds to ask to be included, and I have seen some steady traffic (especially considering the site is now). That never hurts, of course.

More interesting, however, is that I’ve found myself creeping back onto the site daily (if not more). I’ve found myself neglecting Bloglines. As a former newspaper reporter and news junkie, this has become my Web version of popping open my daily newspaper. That’s because more than simply serving as a directory, it is a self-described “dashboard” providing the lastest feed headlines organized by topic. Since I have blogs focusing on parenting and travel, I can quickly scan what top bloggers are saying on the Moms page or the Travel page in just a few moments.

Here is the description of the site’s purpose on the About page:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

I wanted to share this finding with other bloggers simply because new categories are being added regularly, and it could be an opportunity to get on the site before it’s so big it gets difficult. It might be easier as they seek out quality sites to launch new categories. A great way to hear about new categories is to follow Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. You can also visit the Alltop About page to find a link to suggest a site.