ReadWriteWeb

Alltop, Guy Kawaski's project to get all the best sites on the Web organized by topic, is now offering a customization option. This new feature comes exactly one year from the official birth of Alltop, and on top of amazing growth of the site overall. It's called MyAlltop and it is deceptively simple - but very welcome - and really nicely integrated. Basically, MyAlltop lets you choose what sites listed on Alltop you like the most and pull them together on to your own custom Alltop page.

Back when the RSS aggregator web site Alltop launched in March of this year, we compared it to another daily start page favorite of ours at the time, OriginalSignal. Designed to bring RSS to the masses, Alltop, like both Original Signal and Popurls, provides categorized selections of feeds that make it easy to scan a lot of news on a particular subject. Since its launch, Alltop has been adding new categories at such a fast pace that it has now clearly blown away its competition in terms of quantity.

Some ideas are either so good (or so easy to copy), that it's only a matter of time before they have been cloned so many time that they become cliché. Popurls was exactly such an idea - a simple web site that aggregates headlines from various Web 2.0 blogs and social media sites.

The latest Popurls clone is Smashbuys: a site that displays the top sellers in various categories at some of the major online retailers, including Amazon, Newegg, and iTunes.

Today Alltop, an aggregator of RSS feeds, launched. It's a very similar product to one of my daily refreshes, OriginalSignal. Only Alltop covers a much broader range of topics, 40 in total. Alltop's selection of feeds is savvy and wide-ranging - and I'm not just saying that because ReadWriteWeb is the first feed listed in 'Social Media' (although I am very pleased about that!). The service is being positioned as 'RSS for the masses', because it makes it very easy for non-tech people to find new sources to read.

It's Day 8 and my word count is 14,778. Here's the latest. I took yesterday off. Have got a bit of flu, but the show must go on. I'm trying not to take my novel too seriously, having a bit of fun with it. Today I came up with the concept of "space blogs". Heh.

Extraordinary Evidence is now the working title of my novel. I will probably change it later, because it's been used quite often. It comes from the late great Carl Sagan. I read his novel Contact in the early 90's I think and obviously it is an inspiration for my current project. As Mr Sagan said in this interview: "...Precisely because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

12,288 words. Here it is. btw I accidentally discovered an error in the very first sentence today. How embarrassing. So I fixed it up...I thought about leaving it in there, as proof that I haven't done any revisions yet. But then there are probably plenty of other bits of evidence of that!

I may take a day off tomorrow. It'll be Friday night and usually I stay away from the computer then. If I go at 2000 words per day, then that gives me 5 "days off" during November in order to reach 50,000. I'll see how I feel.

I've decided to go the whole hog and post my novel online. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that posting excerpts would mean it would be read out of context. If I'm prepared to post excerpts, I may as well just tell the whole story. Oh and another reason is that Erik Benson dared me to :-)

So here it is, all 10,035 words so far. Remember if you do read some of this (and I certainly am not expecting you to), there have been no revisions and I haven't fixed up the spelling or grammar mistakes. It's a first draft, with all the ugliness expected of first drafts. And it ain't Hemingway, but what the hey...