Alltop
- © 2008 Nononina, Inc.
- Terms of Use
- About Alltop
- Blog
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.”
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.
Nononina is the company that owns Truemors and Alltop. It is “two guys and a gal” in a garage—or more accurately, one guy in home office (Will Mayall), one gal on a kitchen table (Kathryn Henkens), and one Guy in United 2B (Guy Kawasaki). They’ve been working together since the previous century and are still friends. If you can figure out the origin of the name “Nononina,” Guy will send you a free copy of The Art of the Start.
Q. How do the Alltop sites work?
A. We import the stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories. When you place the cursor over a headline, we display part of the story so that you can decide if you’d like to read it. To read the story, click on its title. To go to the home page of the site, click on its domain name.
Q. How often do you update the feeds?
A. Approximately every ten minutes.
Q. What’s with the banner near the bottom of the page? Is that a bug?
A. You fail the test. We put the banner there on purpose. We wanted to flip convention on its head by reversing the positions of the header and footer. Our (tiny) header is everyone else’s footer, and our footer is everyone else’s header. We did this to emphasize that “content is the top priority” at Alltop, not our brand identity. Also, the translucent banner contains a pun: “We’ve got [topic] covered.” Get it? Though we never planned it this way, some people also use it as a page marker to keep track of where they are on a page since the banner remains stationary and you scroll the headlines.
Q. How do you decide which sites and blogs are in a topic?
A. We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.
Q. How do you decide on the order?
A. An even more complex algorithm:
Some sites and blogs bring us credibility. For example, Politics.alltop.com has to display the Washington Post fairly nearly the top. If it were missing or far down the page, we’d expect a first-time visitor to question our quality.
Some sites and blogs are relatively unknown but provide such high-quality information that we feel it’s our moral duty to tell the world about them. Newmedia Jim on Twitterati.alltop.com is an example of this; he’s only a NBC cameraman flying around the world on Air Force One.
We like to shake things up and urge people out of their comfort zones. Hence, Aljazeera is early in the News.alltop.com topic, and we mashed together Christianity, Buddhism, Islamism, and Hinduism together in Religion.alltop.com.
We take care of our friends. If sites or blogs help us, we help them. In particular, we have lots of friends in Moms.alltop.com.
We like to help out underdogs and undiscovered gems; for example, in Humor.alltop.com check out Stuff White People Like.
If you’ve gotten the impression that Alltop is not based on computer algorithms or the wisdom of crowds, you’d be right. We are highly subjective and judgmental.
Q. Some of my favorite sites are not included, how do I get you to add them?
A. Please send us an email, and we’ll consider them. Please note: if your favorite sites don’t provide an RSS feed, we cannot import their stories. And please, tell us what topic you hope to see them included in.
Q. Why does the order of feeds sometimes change?
A. If our server cannot get a site’s stories in a reasonable time, we skip it, and go on to the next one.
Q. How, as a site owner, do I get my site (or blog) moved up the page?
A. Send us a persuasive email. FYI, telling your readers about Alltop and blogrolling is particularly persuasive.
Q. What if I want my site or blog removed from Alltop?
A. Because you have too much traffic? Sure, just send us an email, and we'll take it off.
Q. My feed was on your site, and it’s now gone—what happened?
A. Several things could have happened. First, we “hide” feeds that have not updated in a few weeks. If you don’t keep it updated, we won’t display old stuff. Second, your feed address may have broken. This often happens when you switch to a different feedburning vendor. Try validating your feed here. Third, we may have decided that your feed no longer fits in with our topic.
Q. What if I want to customize what sites are displayed or the order of the feeds?
A. In this version, you cannot customize the sites or their order. We may make it customizable in the future, but we know that this is something a few people will ask for, and nobody will use.
Q. Couldn’t I build my own custom aggregation using a feed reader, customizable home pages, Netvibes, etc?
A. Yes, you could—knock yourself out. While you’re at it, you could backup your hard disk, bake your own bread, iron your own shirts, floss daily, tune your own car, and bike to work.
Q. How do I suggest an additional topic?
A. Please send us an email.
Q. How can I advertise on an Alltop site or sponsor the whole thing?
A. Please send us an email.
Q. What’s your business model?
A. See immediately above.