Today, I continue our new series on my favorite websites for Information Technology Professionals. I either read these daily or subscribe to them via my RSS reader.

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Today, I wish to feature Alltop.  Alltop is a news/web aggregator with a special twist.  Instead of ranking their stories by popularity, they rand their input sites.  The effect is that when you go to one of their “pages” it is a list of best sites with each of their most current stories.  It is very similar to the effect of a large urban newspaper and their sections.  I read this site daily, and I recommend it to you. While you cannot possibly keep up with them, nor be intimately interested in all of their content, the reading will be educational. I learn something new every day from there and cannot even measure the number of times that I have used their links towards my professional development or job performance. If you keep up with them, you will keep up with tech. I hope that you enjoy it.

What is Alltop?  I cannot describe it better than they do… From their own about page:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

 

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

Alltop has a million pages for your perusal on topics far and wide.  I really like their one on Information Technology.  Its URL is http://it.alltop.com/.  I state that because you will notice that contrary to normal web behavior, they don’t keep the same master URL and string pages off it, instead they use sub domain addressing.  They do this for one super reason – it permits them to offer RSS feeds from each section that you can subscribe to separately.  This is a KILLER feature that I have used a lot.  You can simply subscribe to your favorite subjects and magically have those stories appear, in order of publication, in your favorite browser, mail reader, or RSS reader. It also permits them to offer a custom home page feature that is great.  You can create your own Alltop personal page, subscribe to its RSS, and create your own world news feed. 

You can watch their tutorial video here or read it here.

You can setup a Personal Page here  they call it MyAlltop.

Super site!  Super clear!  Super reliable!  Super Super Super!  Please check this great site out.

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended website for next week? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 18, 2009  by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credits: University of Melbourne and monstershaq2000

Special thanks to the team at Alltop   I really appreciate your work at putting out such a terrific resource for the Information Technology Professional community.

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Don’t forget that The IT Thought of the Day Webstore is now open for the Holiday Season! Great selections and anything that you buy at Amazon.com through it helps us without costing you anymore! Happy Holidays with wishes for a joyful New Year.

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