A traditional dead-easy way to read the news with Alltop

When I first started using the Internet in the mid-nineties, I didn’t know much about it apart from that it got information about almost anything. I knew there was a search engine that helps you find the stuff you’re interested in, so I usually fired up a browser and went to Yahoo to browse it’s categories and find interesting webpages.

Later, I found out that Google was working in a different way and returned search results based on relevance to they keywords without any categorization. At first I didn’t like that, but I guess the Internet is huge enough to categorize every web page that exists, so I made friends with the idea over time. But I miss those early times of my Internet adventures and Yahoo’s categories.

Today, most of serious Internet users (web freaks and information addicts like us) spent a big fraction of our online time reading our favorite feeds, Twitter conversations and the like, but I still find it hard to convince non-tech friends of mine (e.g. lawyers, accountants etc) to use RSS. They either can’t see the usefulness in it or don’t seem to get it at all. So they end up visiting the same old half dozen of informative sites they know on a regular basis to get the news.

An easy to use headline aggregator

What these people could benefit from, is a single news aggregator with an uncluttered and dead-easy interface with almost no features at all. And it turns out that Alltop.com may be just that, a place where one can get the headlines of the best sites about a topic. No RSS or any other acronyms to grasp, no need to download a feed reader application to your device, no social features that clutter the interface, and perhaps the most important of all: categorization done by humans.

Just find the topic you’re interested in, bookmark it and visit it when you have time to read the news. Since it’s actual human beings behind each source that gets into a topic, this means that all sources are relevant. Of course this means that the set of sources is limited, but I guess that’s exactly what this team of users want: a limited set of relevant news sources to get the job (of providing information) done easily and quickly, instead of spending hours digging interesting stuff out of automated aggregators.

In an era where start-ups spring like mushrooms after the rain and we’ve laid our hopes of getting information in either the hands of algorithms or social interactions, I’m glad to see a different approach that goes the traditional way. It will be interesting to see if it gets to succeed or not.