There's more you can do with your MyAlltop page too. First, you can re-arrange the web sites on your home page to your liking using a simple drag-and-drop interface. This will come in very handy when you grow your page with new sites that you discover through Alltop. Also, your page has a public URL that you can share with any of your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or the Web.

Taking that a step further, you can become the 'content manager' for members of your family who you think would benefit from Alltop. Once they register, you can log in and manage the placement and sites that they see. In the future, Guy hinted that more customization was on the way that would make this process easier.

Finally, we pressed Guy about additional features, and he said they plan on adding an RSS feed for your primary MyAlltop page, but it will be a bit before that feature appears.

Not For You? That's OK

If you haven't checked out Alltop since its launch, it's probably because you fall more into the earlier adopter set - you were interested in taking a look at the shiny new site at the time, but you're still more than happy with your RSS reader and see no reason to switch. For early adopters like us, using a site like Alltop seems be like moving backwards. That's OK - that's as it should be.

We tend to use services like Google Reader or a configurable start page like Netvibes to read our feeds and this is fine for us. However, we're not necessarily representative of the masses. Not everyone wants to tweak and customize their own personal reader - they simply want a web destination where they can catch up on the news. Alltop can serve that purpose.

Nudge People Into RSS With Alltop

Alltop is also a great resource for getting people started with RSS. Next time you're trying to explain RSS to a friend, you can just send them a link to an Alltop page instead with a note saying "here's a great example of RSS in use." There are so many different subjects covered now, it's easy to find a page (or two or three) that your friend would enjoy, no matter their interests. They've got pages on countries (ex: Argentina), Sports (ex: Hockey), religions (ex: Muslim), activities (ex: crafts), educational resources (ex: personal finance), professions (ex: sales), events (ex: summer Olympics), and so many more.

When your friend returns to you after a while asking if they can add another web site to their Alltop page, you'll know that it's then time to move them into a more robust RSS solution like Netvibes, for example. Alltop was just their training wheels - now they're ready to ride.

Web 2.0 For Beginners

Not only can Alltop help people get into RSS, it's also useful for those just signing up with various Web 2.0 services for the first time. One of the problems with getting into the social web is that when you come so late the game, you don't even know where to begin. The early adopter set has been re-creating their friend graph on numerous sites for years - we know who's interesting to us, who our friends are, who we want to avoid, etc. A Web 2.0 beginner, on the other hand, signs up for a service like Twitter or FriendFeed, and is at a loss.

But that's where a service like Alltop is, again, very useful. When your friend asks you who to follow, you can point them to the Twitterati and Frienderati "starter packs." Here, they can pick and chose from those sites' more prominent users. (They even have the Utterati covered now - who knows what next? Identerati?)

Conclusion

Alltop may not be the most glamorous of today's web resources, but its extensive pages are great tools to nudge people towards the more complex apps we embrace today as both techies and social media enthusiasts. As representatives of this movement, be it the "groundswell", social media, Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, we need to think about how we can make transitions easier for those who still live very much inside the web 1.0 bubble (besides the occasional foray into MySpace, that is). Alltop is certainly a tool that can help with that move, which is why we felt like revisiting this application today.

Someone once called Alltop a "big pile of nothing" (you know who!). They couldn't have been more wrong. You may not have a use for Alltop yourself, but it's time you showed it to your mom and dad.

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.

Smashbuys' business model seems quite simple: affiliate marketing. While Smashbuys doesn't seem to disclose this anywhere on the site, every link to the sellers' sites has an affiliate code in it.

Overall, Smashbuys puts an interesting spin on the Popurls model. The top 10 lists will probably work best for for books, music, and movie tickets, but I'm not sure how many people make their electronics buying decisions this way.

There have been varying reactions to Alltop. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch wrote that Alltop is "just a big pile of nothing." I think he was referring to the fact that it is relatively easy to create an app like Alltop - and he referenced the Web 2.0 Workgroup homepage (developed by Fred Oliveira a few years ago) as an example. Others think that Alltop is filling a need, for mainstream people to get into the RSS reading scene. Mick Liubinskas wrote that "I can see my wife and even my dad using it." Mick said that "they are now both looking for stuff to read and are ready to venture outside of the news sits they know, but they are not quite sure where to start."

Chris Shipley of GuideWireGroup came to a similar conclusion to Mick, noting also that the sourcing of material is an important part of Alltop. Chris said that Alltop is "a collection of the stuff that top bloggers, Twitterers, and social media buffs like to read. It’s not the wisdom of crowds, so much as the wisdom of the most engaged social media advocates." I agree with Chris that the content selection on Alltop is smart and savvy - these are quality blogs. Certainly Alltop has a much broader set of sources than its inspiration, PopURLs (a collection of popular, but slightly cliched by now, blog and social media sources).

I like Alltop. It is a simple app, so I think Mike Arrington had a valid point there. But it's effective and it is definitely an easy scan for people looking for social news to read. It won't satisfy many early adopter types, who will continue to use the likes of Google Reader and Newsgator for 'heavy lifting' of RSS feeds. And early adopters will continue to use the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes for their Alltop-like reading - i.e. when you just want to scan a bunch of your top news sources - because those apps are much more functional and configurable than Alltop.

Will Alltop entice mainstream readers to follow blogs and use RSS more? I hope it does, but there is still a psychological factor to overcome in getting mainstream people to read blogs. While some people recognize that blogs are as much a part of the news ecosystem as mainstream media these days, many others still see blogging as a way to let the world know what you had for breakfast. So a service like Alltop is unlikely to change the latter attitude, which is unfortunately the most common one (not helped by mainstream media, which often portrays blogs as superficial social networking sites).

RSS for the masses? Not sure I'd go that far, but Alltop is a nice, simple service that you can start pointing your non-geek friends and family to.

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."

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.

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...