Ang Peregrino Recommends 71: AllTop

All­Top
URL: http://​all​top​.com/

Alltop is the “online mag­a­zine rack” of the web. The sto­ries are updated every hour. Pick a topic by search­ing, news cat­e­gory, or name, and All­Top will deliver it to you 24 x 7. Their motto is: “aggre­ga­tion with­out aggra­va­tion.” To be clear, All­top pages are start­ing points—they are not des­ti­na­tions per se. Ulti­mately, Alltop’s goal is to enhance your online read­ing by dis­play­ing sto­ries from sources that you’re already vis­it­ing plus help­ing you dis­cover sources that you didn’t know existed. In a nut­shell, All­top is an infor­ma­tion fil­ter to help you find your nuggets of gold.

Pur­pose

The pur­pose of All­top is to help you answer the ques­tion, “What’s hap­pen­ing?” in “all the top­ics” that inter­est you. You may won­der how All­top is dif­fer­ent from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a ques­tion like, “How many peo­ple live in China?” How­ever, it has a much harder time answer­ing the ques­tion, “What’s hap­pen­ing in China?” That’s the kind of ques­tion that All­Top answers.

What it does is col­lect the head­lines of the lat­est sto­ries from the best sites and blogs that cover a cer­tain topic. These collections–called aggre­ga­tions– are then grouped into indi­vid­ual web pages. The five most recent head­lines of the infor­ma­tion sources are then dis­played as well as their first paragraph.

The top­ics range from adop­tion to zool­ogy with pho­tog­ra­phy, food, sci­ence, reli­gion, celebri­ties, fash­ion, gam­ing, sports, pol­i­tics, auto­mo­biles, Mac­in­tosh, and hun­dreds of other sub­jects along the way.

This is the true story of All­top. If you hear any­thing else from us, it’s because we retroac­tively changed the story for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. We are the cre­ators of True­mors, a site that is “NPR (or CBC) for your eyes” in the sense that it con­tains unusual break­ing news, sto­ries, and rumors like what you’d hear on NPR. A bit after the site’s launch, our friend Thomas Mar­ban included True­mors in his single-page aggre­ga­tion of news and tech sites called popurls.

We noticed that pop­urls sends True­mors as much traf­fic as Google. Clearly, he was onto some­thing: Aggre­gate and dis­play a bunch of sites for peo­ple, and they will come. This got us think­ing about other top­ics that (a) have a large read­er­ship and (b) hasn’t been aggre­gated in an ele­gant and effi­cient man­ner, and we came up with idea of a doing a pop­urls of celebrity gos­sip sites. Then one thing led to another: Why not other top­ics like gam­ing, sports, pol­i­tics, Mac­in­tosh, fash­ion, etc.?

If we had stopped at just celebrity gos­sip, we could have stuck with one clever domain, but we had to fig­ure out a way to gather every­thing together when we kept going. “Sugar” was taken, so we came up with “All­top” as in “all the top” stories—you get it. All­top is the main web­site that hosts all the subtopics like celebri­ties, fash­ion, egos, sports, and gaming.