Apropos of ranking, aggregating and such … the search for the top goes on

I’ve been browsing Alltop, a startup aggregator site of news and posts that I was pointed to by Kami Huyse of Communication Overtones in a recent post on her site, where she’s got a good discussion going on.

Suffice to say here that Alltop’s been co-founded by Guy Kawasaki, Kathryn Henkens and Will Mayall and that the site imports the “stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories.” The feeds are updated every ten minutes and the order of feeds is slightly random, as per the Alltop server’s ability to retrieve the story at any given moment …

They’ve got the Beta version up now and apparently, it’ll be customizable at some point in the future. For now, from what I’ve seen, it could turn out to be fairly useful in identifying what’s happening in any given vertical, especially in the blogspace in those verticals.

Not sure as to the extent to which Alltop will be amplifying the categories in the future; would be surprised if they share much details about how their aggregator works, but maybe Guy Kawasaki or one of the other co-founders will weigh in and enlighten me on this.

I’ve taken the liberty of lifting Kami’s table of categories and have reproduced here for your quick click-through pleasure:

AUTOS CELEBRITIES CUTE DESIGN EGOS FASHION GADGETS GAMING GREEN MAC

MOMS NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY POLITICS ODDITIES RELIGION SCIENCE SMALL BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA SPORTS

One of the categories they’ve not included — fortunately! — is public relations blogs.

But, for that particular vertical there are several options, including Brendan Cooper’s evolving aggregation of various blog ranking tools into his PR Friendly Index, to which he’s now added a “PR Friendly Index FAQ” for those wanting to know why and how it was created, as well as site badges for those who wish to post a graphic link on their own blogs or websites. To whit:

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