Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Apart from helping people connect and interact and collaborate on things, Internet has actually democratized information. People can now upload their thoughts in any form (text, audio, video, mashup), tag them appropriately and watch the entire world discover it and take it forward.

You no longer need to be a celebrity or a rockstar or a politician to attract crowds as long as you know the right forums to voice your opinion.

The beauty of the medium is that the response is immediate. You will know in an instant if your idea holds merit and if it excites more people. You will get instant feedback. You will get in touch with people who think the way you think and you can now collaborate.

Any quick and dirty opinions?

Today I bribed my way in India.Alltop.Com. An awesome achievement I must say considering that they list only the best of the best. Off the 100 odd resources there, notable inclusions are Gurcharan Das, John Elliot, apart from regular ones like pluggdIn, Mutiny.in, WebYantra etc.

And I guess its about time I wrote about Alltop.

WhatIs Alltop?

Started by Guy Kawasaki (former Apple Fellow and author Art of the Start, bio), Alltop aggregates resources from mass niches around the world and displays them on one page. So they have innovation.alltop.com, cricket.alltop.com, marketing.alltop.com and a lot of other mass niche categories (complete list is on their homepage). They like to call themselves a magazine rack (I tend to disagree though).

Infact, just yesterday Dan Roam (Art of visual Thinking and author The Back of Napkin), posted his interpretation on Alltop here. He says that Alltop does the filtering for you by using human editors and recommendations (as compared to Google where all results are available in raw formats and you are left with tedious job of sifting for content you want to see). More details on Guy’s blog here.

So how does it help?

If you are a cricket fan and are looking for cricket related blogs and news listing, rather than using a Google search, you can head on to Cricket.Alltop and browse what real people are talking about cricket. Instead of using a feed reader and subscribing to 100 feeds on cricket, all you need is to point to a browser and you will have all the top news and websites on cricket on one place.

In effect Alltop helps you identify the content that you might be interested in and would reduce the search time and cost (read my earlier post on search cost here) for you.

For a blogger, Alltop becomes a platform where the blogger will find audience that he wants to target. For example if I write about entrepreneurship, I want VCs, startups, prospective hires to read my blog rather than any other netizen. On Alltop, as a publisher I am sure I would reach the right people.

Overall, the website is usable and solves a problem for both readers and publishers

More on Information and Search

As it is very commonly said, if the information is important for me, it will find me. From blogs I read to people I interact with to my contacts, I would most probably have contacts who know me well enough to pass on information of my liking to me. Alltop does the same thing. It becomes my default information source. However some tweaking needs to be done to become the complete information source but I am sure team Alltop are working towards refining this already.

What else is noticeable about Alltop?

1. Appeal to Ego: Alltop massages your ego. Take me for an example. I used to use Alltop to find content when I was bored. But moment they added me, I am now an Alltop evangelist. I am spreading word about it. And if you can get early adopters as evangelists, nothing like it.
2. Viral Effect: Just because it massages your ego and says that you are amongst the best, you start spreading the word. You post about it on your blog, you update on twitter and you talk to your friends about it.

Questions to team Alltop

1. Can one blog be a part of two sections? Say India and Entrepreneurship? Yes you can be a part of two or more. (Tip: Gautam Ghosh is part of three (HR, Careers and India)
   
2. How about further dividing categories? Something like Marketing.India.Alltop?
3. Are there plans of creating an iGoogle like website where people sign up and see only the feeds that they want to see? (Alltop already does this but using AJAX and cookies). Will this is be too far from the Alltop idea?
4. What is the business model? Where would alltop make money from? Inline advertisements? (there was some mention of selling ads but dont have the link. Can someone give the link)?
5. UPDATE: How about a social network for people features on alltop? These are the ones that are known to have a better than average opinion on things. If these guys got together, I am sure interesting things would come out of it.

Ideas in this post

1. Find an offering that caters to mass-niche.
2. Reduce the search cost for your target audience.
3. Let the users spread the word themselves. Make them evangelists rather than you doing the hard work.

What do you think of Alltop? Do you find it useful? And please note that my opinions might be colored :)

A friend emailed me following

The problem with the progressing world and the ever-evolving generations of human is the overwhelming assortment of information, thoughts and ideas thrown around with little care leaving many dumbfounded and many others thinking and analyzing those bits that came their way. While there are some who are simply left confused because they don’t know what exactly to absorb and what to ignore and worst still how to interpret and how to infuse it with their understanding of the world and life. Left behind as a result are ambiguous thoughts and confounded souls living unfocused lives with hazy dreams. As they say “ignorance is bliss” !

An after-thought:
Meet the new generation… aware and confused. Just as we were as kids and now as youth… just as our parents were at the prime of their life… the information burden just keep on increasing with the passing decades… as the generation passes by, there is more to know and discuss with ever-increasing pressure to know…

Meet the kids of today… overwhelmed with the burden of knowledge… burden imposed by us… accepted by them… given the increased level of their curosity… given the easy access to information sources. With the progressing world, every time we pass on a larger information dump onto our future generations causing them to think and grow much faster than their predecessors.

And I wonder, if this more knowledgeable generation will be better prepared to face the world out there and lead an enriched life or will it just lead to the loss of innocence much earlier than required without helping them to grow into better humans?!!

Here is my reply.

There is only one peril. With the democratization of information and things available at finger tips, everyone is expressing themselves. Most people are not really thinking. They are just paddling what others have said. And thus the noise increase. Its the classic battle between signal and noise and currently there is a lots and lot of noise around.

And this noise adds to ignorance. People think its enlightenment but it truly is ignorance.

As far as the next generation of India goes, thing is that burden is only expected. Darwin once said and I totally agree that the fittest survive. If you are not fit enough, if you are not knowledgeable enough, if you are not intelligent enough, you would be in the lowest rung of the pecking order and that is not an interesting place to be. Once you are there, you loose everything that a human being wants from life - authority, power, food, sex, control and other things like that.

Any feedback?