Alltop: Find Top Sites by Topic


Alltop helps you find 30 authoritative sites on various topicsAlltop is a site that proves complex is not always better. Sometimes the most helpful Web resources are deceptively simple.  (Remember that for your next Web startup.)

Alltop is a site that collects or aggregates headlines from top sites, including media and blog sites.  It arranges the sites and headlines by topics, such as photography, celebrities, science and, yes, even small business.  Think of it as a digital magazine rack.

The main page of Alltop (http://alltop.com) lists all the topics. 

Then you jump over to individual pages that aggregate the headline stories under each topic.  The Career topic is at http://career.alltop.com.  Small business is http://smallbusiness.alltop.com.  And so on.

Alltop is from Nononina Inc, which describes itself as two guys and a gal in a garage.  Rock-star venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki is one of the people behind Nononina.

In its About page, Alltop gives the best description of what the site does, writing:

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.”

Alltop is a clean-looking, easy to scan site.  It is intuitive and human-friendly.

Today there are so many websites that the hardest thing is sorting through the chaff to get to the wheat.  Often searching to find sites feels like being down in the weeds hunting through grains of sand.  Will you eventually stumble across good sites to bookmark?  Certainly.  But you’re going to have to look at a lot of grains of sand first.

Alltop lets you avoid some of that labor.  You can discover sites that regularly cover particular topics in depth.  Bookmark an Alltop page and you can refer back to it and have 30 authoritative sites on a topic all in one place, along with five of the latest headlines from each.

By its very nature Alltop is subjective in how it chooses sites.  With each topic being limited to about 30 sites, it is bound to leave out a few of your favorite sites.  But unless you are a complete information junkie, you will likely discover (or re-discover) some new sites, too.

And the good news is, they invite you to suggest sites to include. There’s an email address for that purpose — and it does not go into a black hole. I sent in an email suggestion and actually got a personal response back, from Guy Kawasaki himself.

The advantage of Alltop is that you have a great starting point. Someone else has done the heavy lifting. It can save you hours of time.

Of course, you can have the best of both worlds by using Alltop as a starting point and then bookmarking other sites you like using a tool such as Netvibes or PageFlakes.

Check out Alltop. What are your impressions?

7 Comments ▼

Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

7 Reactions
  1. The great resources never end! This is another great site you’ve found. It is neatly organized and with nice simple colors. I really like that just scrolling over a headline gives you a nice little snippet of the article. That way you can decide if it’s worth reading the whole thing. I think that having the sites in alphabetical order on each topic page would be better though. They would be a little quicker to find if you are specifically looking for one site.

  2. This is a great platform that enhances reading online as it aggregates headlines on the board. It really helps in sceaming through the topics and get to the desired one… thanks a lot for this post.

  3. In my post, Web Stuff in One Place, I have a link to “Web Strategist” who discusses Alltop.

  4. I’m with you agreeing that Alltop is “Intuitive and human friendly” I’m amazed by all the negativity about Alltop. Although I run a travel website and write 2 travel blogs I’m not a techie person.

    I think Alltop is a great resource, you can check out the titles of all the leading blogs in topics which area of interest to you, quickly and easily. Not everyone understands RSS and/or want to subscribe to blogs. Alltop offers a good alfternative.

    I have to admit to some bias as both my travel blogs are listed in Travel Alltop.

    Here’s my post, “Does Alltop sound the death knell for blog subscription or an edn to being b(l)ogged down” (you can see why I’ve used tinyurl:

    http://tinyurl.com/54sezr

  5. Hi Karen,

    The tech early adopters who spend a tremendous amount of time online and already have in place advanced tools to go out and find what they want, are the ones being negative. What they probably do not realize is that the majority of the population don’t know how to find the tools they use. Nor do the majority of people have the time or inclination to figure out how to search for feeds and set them up using such tools.

    Or they point to some of the tech aggregators, which are excellent if all you’re interested in is technology. But what about other topics? The world does not revolve around tech.

    I view Alltop as a tremendous time saver. Why should I spend the time going out and looking for sites if Alltop.com has already saved me the trouble?

    Anita

  6. Hi Everyone,
    I have a carpet cleaning business in Houston,TX that was doing pretty good until the economy went bad, and with it my clientele. I have a website for the business but I dont
    know what I have to do the get it to show up in a search. Right now it’s somewhere in the yahoo/google netherworld (LOL).

    Is there someone on here that can give me some insight or know of anyone that coud give me insight on how I can get my local website on the front
    page of a Yahoo or Google search to increase my business without it costing me 5 or 10k $$$? If so please share with me.

    I thank you and my hungry over-eating children thank you.

    thanks,