Alltop - A table of contents for the Internet

Alltop is a very simple and cool site that can help people find what is currently popular, by topic, on the Internet. Their slogan is "we've got all the top stories covered all the time." The page updates every 10 minutes as well. This is a good site for people that won't build their own custom homepage on Netvibes, MyYahoo, or iGoogle and those that do have custom homepages may find some good new sites to add to their homepage. I personally think it is neat to see what all of the top global news articles are. Gone are the days of having to just rely on 1 newspaper or newsprogram to stay informed. This opens the doors up to deeper acountability in reporting the news. For example, one could quickly compare Al Jazeera Headlines to CNN Headlines side by side and see how each venue spins various stories. This would be a great way for students to hone their critical thinking skills by comparing and contrasting the various outlets of information. What makes one source more credible than the other? Plus, it would be cool to see TerenceOnline added to their topic page on Education. I would like to see Alltop add a search engine to their site. Categories + Search Engine = More access to information.

Here is what the site says about itself:

"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.”

Google acquires feedburner

Feedburner is an excellent resource for bloggers and now google owns them too. You know all of those little subscription icons on the right hand side of the screen. Feedburner creates those and makes it easy for people to subscribe. "Chicago-based FeedBurner is a leading provider of feed distribution and management tools. A web feed is a way for online publishers to syndicate their content and deliver it straight to readers. Each day, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content. Further, FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads. Read entire article

RSS in Plain English - A Must See Video!

Finally, a video in plain english that explains one of the most important Internet technologies that is revolutionizing the internet and making it better...RSS. This video is a great follow-up to my previous post on Blogging in academia. This video simply demonstrates the power of the blog and RSS technology. His favorite reader, as mentioned in the video, is Google Reader, but I find Netvibes works much better for my style (Netvibes is my personal learning environment packed with feeds, podcasts, vodcasts, to-do lists, bookmarks, and much more). I'll make a post on the power of personal learning environments later, but for now, enjoy the video and be prepared to completely understand RSS.