Guy Kawasaki is weaving the tale of Alltop on his blog today. We’re biased, of course, but it’s a great story. The initial concept (and implementation) was that of a single topic aggregator. Seven months later, we have more than 200 topics with a new process that will allow thousands more.
Before we get too far, we should explain what the site (or more accurately, sites) is. Alltop is a news aggregator. Each topic draws from credible blog sources to display recent headlines / excerpts without dwelling on the fact it’s fed by RSS. News is kept current and relevant by a small team of humans and robots. These topics are organized under the Alltop umbrella but can be accessed directly or found via a simple search at alltop dot com. Tell it you’re looking for politics, and it gives you politics dot alltop dot com. Simple.
The real story is in the marketing, though. Our last project with Guy was quickly dubbed the Worst Site on the Internetâ„¢. And although, it generated a huge amount of mixed buzz, it doesn’t compare to his latest gig. Alltop tapped into something more like technorati authority or twitter leaderboard standings. People like the site(s), and they want in.
Another story is in the scaling efforts the site required. One of the topics actually has more than a thousand stories at any given time – complete with excerpts and microformats (not that anyone notices). We’ve had to tweak to get it to play nice with the increasing traffic.
We’ve also set up a system to allow the Alltop team easy topic creation and management. I mean, we had one all along, but it involved emailing a nerd who’d then do things manually. We got rid of the nerd.
A few days ago we introduced a brand new landing page to help make finding topics easy. It was overdue – the old site was never meant to organize hundreds of topics. We’re excited about version 2.
Any way, Guy tells stories better than we do. Go check out his post and / or visit Alltop.