TheWayoftheWeb

After a year of aggregating feeds on a pretty large range of topics, Alltop has released personal MyAlltop pages.

MyAlltop - personal alltop pages

What was nice was that existing Alltop users like myself got an email from Guy to give us the chance to secure our usernames before anyone else turned up.

And it’s a reasonably nice and easy set-up – register, log-in, and then visit any existing Alltop category, and simply tick which feeds you wish to include on your own page – then order them by dragging and dropping.

(For reference, this blog appears on Social Media, my Twitter account is on Twitterati, and my other blog, 140char is on Twitter)

And there are now accounts for Dan Thornton, BadgerGravling, TheWayoftheWeb and 140char on My Alltop – although so far, I’ve only had time to add my own feeds and will have to dedicate some time tonight to aggregating my favourite sources to the TheWayoftheWeb and 140Char accounts.

But why?

What’s interesting to me is why they’ve launched personal aggregation – one reason is probably the number of feeds in each category has become a little overwhelming. Guy Kawasaki is claiming the service features 31,000 sources on 550 topics already.

Obviously there is also an SEO benefit in having hundreds of people linking to their personal pages, and it means the service is more likely to get repeated fresh links as people add to their personal pages.

And it might boost usage as some people will prefer their personal aggregation over the category pages.

Plus, bearing in mind Alltop currently serves display advertising, there’s suddenly a lot more real estate being created, promoted and potentially becoming popular.

But:

I’m hoping there are more reasons for launching this new service, in addition to those listed above – otherwise it might not really fly.

As others have rightly pointed out, public and personal aggregators already exist – Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle for starters. Plus options such as Google Reader, which also offers shared items (My shared items are here).

(Incidentally, Marshall Kirkpatrick has been posting some interesting stuff on Netvibes)

And then there are the popularity based aggregators such as SocialMedian, more semantic options like Twine, and the old school (e.g. Digg).

In addition, MyAlltop is hampered slightly by only allowing feeds already listed to be included, and not having any search functionality – meaning you need to skim through some fairly big pages to find your own feeds and any you know/might think are on there.

So what could there be?

Some people might find it slightly simpler to aggregate existing Alltop feeds than on rival services – particularly those who don’t necessarily already know a load of social media bloggers ( for example), and have their RSS feeds in other services.

Then there are the future possible options to include other feeds, display the selection as a widget, flag up favourite posts, perhaps group invidual posts around topics/questions etc, etc.

But from a quick brainstorm, I’m missing what really makes MyAlltop stand out at the moment – so I’m hoping you’ll give me some ideas to include?

Hopefully you shouldn’t be affected, although you might see the odd piece of advertising.

However, if you have come here because your RSS feed has mysteriously vanished, or appears to be full of more nonsense than normal, let me know at thewayoftheweb at googlemail.com. Also let me know if the sudden appearance of adverts annoys or irritates you…

While the chaps over at Friendfeed might be proposing we augment RSS with Simple Update Protocol, there’s  a slightly more basic (from my side) bit of syndicated going on, which I’m calling ‘SRSBS’ (Someone Really Simple Being Syndicated).

What this means is that I’m now one of the bloggers being syndicated onto the Socially Minded group blog. And interestingly, the idea is to group together all of the social media/technology types in the charming county of Cambridgeshire – tying together similar ideas, but also forming a loose collective to be able to meet in real life and share ideas.

Aside from myself, there’s also Matthew Brazil of 6Consulting, my Bauer Media colleague David Cushman, Alan Moore of Communities Dominate Brands fame, and Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets. Plus two resident bloggers outside of Cambridgeshire, Gennefer Snowfield, and  Ian Hendry.

More Cambridgeshire people are welcome – and in fact it’s already led me to discover one of the contacts I keep meaning to meet in London actually commutes from within about 15 miles of my house! Matthew Brazil is coordinating everything, so he’s your man to be added.

I think I’m the only person on the list special enough to have two blogs on the list – this place, and 140char.com. I just hope people don’t stop coming to visit my natural environment and contributing to the millions * I earn from Adsense

*millions may be a lie to portray myself as a rich, successful make money blogger. I may, in fact, not actually make very much at all. But that’s not really the point of this blog…

How so?

• I’ve just published a new post over at www.140char.com on How to back-up your Twitter account and contacts.
• Although I’m still using Feedeachother as an online RSS reader (Find me, here), I’ve bowed to public opinion and also signed up for Google Reader. It’s no slur towards Feedeachother, and the hard work by it’s creator,Udi, but I’m increasingly aware that it’s handy not only to export lists of bookmarks, feeds and contacts on a regular basis, but also to have them readily accessible somewhere. It’s also giving me the chance to compare the two services and see which one offers what I need. You can see my Google Reader shared items, here.
• I don’t think I’ve ever published the location of my profile on Stumbleupon. If you’re not spammy, you can find me here, as badgergravling. It tends to be a mixture of tech, cars, motorcycles, and some photography and bizarre stuff. Some of the stumbles are for sites I work on, but only if it’s things I think are good enough to share – and I find an equal amount from the aggregate of all the other sites I visit during a day!
• I’m also on Del.icio.us, here (I’m not signed up to the delicious.com namechange!), and also on Digg - and quite a few other networks. I’ve got most of them listed on Friendfeed and MyBlogLog, but there aren’t any other badgergravlings I’ve encountered yet – mainly because it’s an intentional mispelling.
• I’m also signed up and become part of Seth Godin’s Triiibes group, which was invite-only for those pre-ordering his next book. I’m still not entirely convinced it’s not just an experimental social ant farm, but there’s definitely some interesting things that could come out of it.
• And finally, I had to slip in a mention of Dave Cushman’s latest post on /Message. Mainly because he namechecks me, and by the look of it, it either never gets picked up, or it’s a nofollow blog – which seems a little odd for someone like Stowe Boyd, unless he’s done it to combat spam comments…

Right, that’s cleared some of the decks…