Alltop Has All the Tops Stories, and Egos, Covered
I was just alerted that I have been included in the Alltop index of top sites on the Web. Wow, thank you. It's a pretty incredible group of voices and I'm more than flattered to be included. — Introducing Guy Kawasaki's latest startup, Alltop.
Context & Ripple Effects
Guy Kawasaki has spent the past year testing low-cost consumer web plays: after his tenure at Garage Technology Ventures funded ideas none of which hit big, he publicly shifted to 'deliberately stupid' startup concepts and launched the rumor-board Truemors into private beta in mid-2007. Alltop — an index of 'top stories and sites' — is the next entry in that sequence.
The mechanism is ego-driven distribution: bloggers announce their own inclusion, as this bub.blicio.us post does, generating links for Alltop at zero acquisition cost. It lands amid an active debate over who ranks the web's voices — Dave Winer was questioning whether a new top 100 made sense as recently as October 2007, while Topix cracked the top 20 news sites earlier that year with its own rebrand.
First-order effects
- Bloggers added to the index get placement beside what Alltop deems elite company, plus a referral stream — the immediate payoff behind the flattered announcement.
- Alltop converts each announced inclusion into inbound links and attention for Kawasaki's venture, a marketing engine that runs on the egos of the listed rather than ad spend.
Second-order effects
- Human-curated 'top' lists put pressure on algorithmic news aggregators, since inclusion decisions become editorial acts that publishers lobby for and tout.
- Rival curators face a copycat incentive: whoever publishes an authoritative list inherits both the traffic and the gatekeeping complaints that follow it.
Third-order effects
- If curated indexes proliferate, influence measurement drifts toward the judgment of listmakers rather than raw traffic or links — a structural shift in how authority on the open web gets assigned, with all the subjectivity disputes that implies.
The trend: News discovery on the social-era web is splitting between algorithmic ranking and human-curated 'top' lists, whose real product is the status they confer on those listed.