There are tons of tools available for organizing your personal news. Better known as RSS aggregators, my personal favorite is simply Google Reader or its companion tool that I wrote about earlier, Feedly.
The problem with all these aggregation readers is you actually have to set them up. You need to find the blogs and news feeds that are important in those categories. I remember wasting an entire morning setting one up for NetVibes and now I no longer use that service.
Wouldn’t it be great if a service did all the aggregation on all the topics for you? So you wouldn’t have to waste all your time setting it up? That’s exactly what Alltop does. It’s an aggregator of blogs and news
feeds on different categories. Want to know all the hot news in hockey, hip hop, or mixed martial arts? They’ve done the legwork for you and found all the important sites. Simply link to those pages and scan all the headlines.
They’ve got categories that are far more business oriented (e.g. insurance), plus local categories such as my town, San Francisco. And like every other feed aggregator they give you an option to create your own channel. But that doesn’t interest me. I just like the fact that Alltop has done all the work of searching the top sites in every category for me.
This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 3/30/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You must be getting paid to push these stupid web sites. So, I either take the time (OMG!) to set up my news reader once with the news sources I like and trust, or I take the time to sift through the deluge of headlines returned from all top every time I want to read the news. Pretty weak.
Grant, if you know a sponsor that is willing to pay for me to write my posts, please let me know. :)
Think about it this way. If all of a sudden you think, I want to know what’s going on in a certain category right now you could conduct an online search, get some results, you could spend minimum of an hour setting up feeds (yes, it would take that long), or you could just go to Alltop.
I know you think setting up feeds takes no time, but if you want to know what’s going on in a category, you’re not going to set up all the feeds every single time.