timmyjohnboy.com

Create your own online magazine rack with Alltop.com

One of the interesting things about the Internet is the sheer amount of information out there.  Sure, there is probably a very small percentage of it that each person is even remotely interested in, or has time to absorb, OR is even a little edifying, but how does one filter out the other stuff?  Well, that is an ongoing issue for everyone, believe it or not.  Many people call it “information overload.”  Well, a man named Clay Shirky is quoted as saying “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

There are many solutions people are coming up with to filter information.  One method is subscription to RSS feeds with feed readers such as Google Reader.  This method is fairly successful.  I, however, often run into the issue of subscribing to too many feeds and, therefore, end up in the same situation.

I ran into a new service that helps to filter news and articles into topics that you’d want to read.  It attempts to create a personal online magazine rack for the individual.  It’s called Alltop.com.  From the horse’s mouth:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.

Alltop’s purpose is to filter and assimilate topics that interest you in order to make it easy to absorb.  Basically, you can read what you want to read on the topics you enjoy without all of the other junk making it harder to find.

Alltop has some interesting features.  One of the first features I noticed is that while I was browsing, Alltop was remembering the topics I was reading, making a list for me in case I wanted to revisit something.  This was done before signing up for an account; I was just a visitor.

If you sign up for an account, you can save the news sources you like so you can peruse the most recent articles from each source.

All they want from you is a user name, password and an email for account confirmation.

Once you’ve signed up you can begin to search for topics you like.

You can also browse by topic or alphabetically.

I chose to peruse the tech section and I narrowed it down to “blogging.”

If you feel like subscribing to a news source or blog, just click the plus sign and it turns into a check mark.

Very cool service.  All you have to do is visit the MyAlltop page to get a gander of everything you’ve subscribed to.  I think the site is cool and it has a good start.  I would like to see the possibility of adding topics to the MyAlltops page to better organize my news sources.  I do enjoy how easy it is to browse for articles without the sign up process and MyAlltops page but I’m sure each of us are different.