Alltop Launches Vertical Aggregators

Last year, while in Malta, I had the not-very-original idea to launch a series of RSS aggregation sites in the style of PopURLs.com. There’d be one for food blogs (MenuBender.com), one for marketing blogs (Promophobe.com), one for movie blogs (BestBoyBlues.com) and so forth. The fun part, really, was choosing the domains.

You can actually see a bit of a prototype at BestBoyBlues.com. I hadn’t actually put the blogs in yet, and the design was pretty basic, but you get the idea. I was going to use a Digg-esque voting mechanism to let the communities choose the sites. I planned to run advertising, and give half the profits to charity.

I got a little ways along with the project, but then got busy with work, writing a book, swimming in the Med, and so forth. I was reluctant to do it in part because I’m inherently lazy, and knew if would be a lot of manual work and then a ton of promotional effort. It’s been nagging at me ever since.

Happily, I can let it go, because Guy Kawasaki would have eaten my breakfast, lunch and dinner with the recently launched Alltop. It’s a ‘digital magazine rack’ of blogs and news sites, organized into specific categories. I like the implementation a lot–it’s minimalist, fast and the website choices seem to be pretty rational. I think it’s a bit lame to have a ‘Women’ category in among ‘Dads’, ‘Celebrities’ and ‘Twitterati’, but I suppose it’s reflective of the web’s social structure.

This will also be a boon to marketers trying to find online influencers in a particular category. It’s still a tricky prospect, and a site like this will definitely help.