If the name Guy Kawasaki sounds familiar, that may have something to do with the product that he is known for making popular – a little computer Apple introduced back in 1984 called the Macintosh. Among other things, Guy is known as the original tech evangelist, and in fact coined the term “evangelism” as we all use it in the business world today. He is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author of more than a dozen books, including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, Selling the Dream, The Macintosh Way, and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, all of which revolve around his main theme of creating a memorable product or user experience that inspires fierce customer loyalty and creates buzz.
In short, Guy Kawasaki is the advocate’s advocate. His latest venture is called Alltop, which he describes as “the digital magazine rack of the internet.” It’s a directory site that catalogs those web destinations Kawasaki sees as best of breed. It’s an aggregator of buzzworthy news and content, similar to Popurls, which he openly credits as his inspiration.
Alltop’s home page is presented as a streamlined alphabetic listing of categories. Mouse over a category name and a mini-blurb appears on what you can expect to find on that topic. Pick a topic such as Celebrities or Health or Moms or Teen News and you end up on a page full of recommended sites — both mainstream news sites and blogs — with a content feed of the five most recent items for each site. Again, Alltop lets you mouse over any title or entry to see a mini-preview of the content before clicking through. So if Alltop has a page covering a topic or demographic of interest, it presents an efficient way to do a quick flyover of that information space, even if you don’t click through to any of the sites.
So what’s the value? Alltop’s critics insist there’s really nothing new here, just a warmed-over directory of sites with feeds. Michael Arrington of
TechCrunch called it “a big pile of nothing,” essentially a copycat of Popurls with a slightly different twist. Forrester’s Jereniah Owyang calls it “a gimmick site with marketing flair.” Others point out that it’s unnecessary, especially given the growing number of people who compile their own pages of top sites via RSS feeds. Kawasaki responds to this charge in an interview with ValleyZen:
Our market is people who don’t know what NetVibes and iGoogle or My Yahoo – don’t know what a feed is. It’s so nice to just go someplace and have all 35 top celebrity gossip sites laid out for you.
Alltop’s business model is based on selling ads, but only a few are in evidence at this early stage. It’s expected that ad buys will increase after traffic reaches a critical mass, and six months after its launch in February 2008, it’s off to a decent start. Google assigns Alltop’s home page a Page Rank of 6, which is very respectable considering how new it is on the scene. Alexa ranks Alltop among the top 100,000 of the millions of websites it tracks. And although traffic is modest by the standards of Google and Yahoo, which see billions of visits per month, Alltop saw nearly a half million visits in June according to Compete.com, which shows it trending upward relative to Popurls and Truemors (Kawasaki’s other site, recently purchased by NowPublic).
So is Alltop worth a look? Definitely, if you’re in search of top websites and blogs on specific topics. Alltop’s listing is eclectic, and ranges across a wide swath of topics from A-Z. The site’s blog announces newly added categories; recent arrivals include ADHD, Midlife, PR and Nursing.
And who decides who is top on Alltop? As Guy explains on Alltop’s About page, it’s very, um, scientific:
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.
(As you might gather from the above, Guy is very active on Twitter, where he microblogs a more or less steady stream of thought-provoking observations, comments, wisecracks and links. You can follow him here. You can also tap into his perspective via his blog, How to Change the World.)
Guy goes on to offer his criteria for how sites are ordered within a category:
- 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, Islam, 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.
And since there are humans in the loop, Guy is open to a being pitched, as he freely admits above. As proof, you may note that among the listings in Music.alltop.com, about halfway down the page, is Perfect Porridge, the music site/blog of our own Greg Swan, the result of a late-night email exchange between Greg and Guy.
This suggests that Alltop is more than just a convenient jumping-off point for conducting research — it’s also a place to seek out advocates, and to create visibility for advocates. Pretty useful for a site that Kawasaki likens to a digital Home Depot — “100,000 square feet and we try to have everything.”