by Brian Solis

Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop media empire continues to rapidly expand. If you don’t already know about it, Alltop is essentially a curated online magazine rack featuring thousands of sources, organized by industry or topic, to provide “aggregation without aggravation.”

Kawasaki and team recently introduced My.Alltop, which enables viewers to build a custom news page sourced from the qualified pundits and sources on any given topic that interests you. It’s reminiscent  of NetVibes, but features only crowdsourced voices as a way of filtering out the noise and increasing the signal.

Here’s mine: My.Alltop.com/BrianSolis

My.Alltop dashboard features some of my favorite thought leaders in tech, new journalism, sociology, Web 2, and social media, including (in no particular order):

Guy Kawasaki, Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Tara Hunt, Doc Searls, David Armano, Fred Wilson, MetaFilter: Sociology, Chris Brogan, Jason Calacanis, Chris Anderson, Everyday Sociology, Hugh MacLeod, MindBlink, Shel Holtz, Mind Hacks, Richard Edelman, Peter Shankman, Enthnography, Dave Fleet, Brand Autopsy, Hubspot, Publishing 2.0, Adrants, Peter Kim, Todd Defren, B.L. Ochman, Psyblog, Media/Anthropology, Jeff Jarvis.

I highly recommend Alltop especially if you’re researching or seeking qualified authorities on the subjects that will help you excel. My.Alltop is my new homebase for tapping into the intellectual capital that feeds wisdom and also sparks new ideas each and every day – all from one place.

Sign up and discover the information that motivates, educates, entertains, and inspires you.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

by Brian Solis, originally published at PR 2.0

To bypass the background story and skip straight to the instructions for Twitter Bowl, click here.

In 2008, Jeremiah Owyang had a great idea to extend the conversation about Super Bowl ads from my living onto Twitter. Chris Heuer, Stephanie Agresta, Darryl Siry, Ben Metcalfe, Eric Gonzales, and I quickly supported the idea and set up a series of Twitter stations to kick things off. Josh Bernoff of Forrester analyzed 2,500 tweets and organized the results into an impressive ratings summary. That was the beginning of #superbowlads on Twitter.

This year, we will continue the tradition of rating the Super Bowl ads on Twitter, but with a small twist – one that hopefully makes Josh Bernoff’s life a little bit easier. Unfortunately Jeremiah and Shirley are returning from Hawaii, so I had a different idea to get us back into the game, while contributing and showcasing the results in real time.

This year, we’ve also rallied the support of Louis Gray, Guy Kawasaki, and Jesse Stay, founder of SocialToo. Since Twitter is rooted in public interaction and provides the ability to extend its functionality, I wanted to find a Twitter application that would allow us to not only monitor discussions and ratings related to #superbowlads, but also provide the ability to capture and present votes.

SocialToo is a suite of productivity solutions for Twitter and other social networks. It’s most notable and unique feature is SocialSurverys, providing the ability to create elegant polls that can be shared across multiple networks (provides for automatic distribution through Twitter) and tracked in one central location for analysis.

Introducing the Second Annual Twitter Bowl…

Your hosts:

Jeremiah Owyang – @jowyang
Chris Heuer – @chrisheuer
Louis Gray – @louisgray
Jesse Stay – @jesse
Guy Kawasaki – @guykawasaki
Yours Truly – @briansolis

How to Play:

- If you don’t already have a Twitter account, join here.

- Vote for your favorite ads here and share the following link with everyone you know (do so often): http://poprl.com/FmN

- Discuss and rate each of the Superbowl ads on Twitter. Be sure to add “#superbowlads” to your Tweet.

That’s it!

Enjoy the game and follow the conversation. We’ll publish the final stats and compare the how Twitter compares to mainstream polls.

Don’t forget, share this link! http://poprl.com/FmN

For more on the subject, please read:

Louis Gray

Jeremiah Owyang

SocialToo Blog

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by Michelle Lentz

Well, actually it’s more like some nips and tucks

Twitter made some cosmetic changes last week and this week it’s Alltop. Alltop is Guy Kawasaki’s site that lists the “top” blogs in a category. As there are now 200+ categories, it was time to redesign the site and make it easier to find things.

My wine site is on Alltop. The day I got the email from Guy Kawasaki (I realize that it might have been an intern just signing his name), I jumped up and down. I don’t often see emails from famous tech folks in my inbox you know. How are the top sites determined? According to Alltop:

We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

The site now includes a handy topic search as your entry page. You can now search by keyword, view by category, and view by topic name. The site is only 180 days old (give or take a few days), so its growing by leaps and bounds. It’s had over 5 million page views during that time.

My favorite thing about the new redesign? The tutorial. The trainer in me is thrilled with their fun video on how to use Alltop.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.