Alltop: RSS without the RSS

I’ve been getting @GuyKawasaki ‘s Tweets about Alltop, but until today I hadn’t clicked through to find out what it was all about.

In essence, Alltop is a pre-loaded set of RSS feeds by subject, in which Guy and his fellow curators have sought some of the top sites and aggregated them into one page.

I was pleased to see that MayoClinic.com was in the top left corner of the health.alltop.com page.

There’s a PR page, as well as others on homeschooling, Cancer, Lifehacks, Christianity, DIY, Science, WordPress, Blogging, College Basketball and many others. More are being added at least every week.

What’s great about Alltop is you can just use it, and you don’t have to waste time customizing. In fact, you can’t customize it, except that you can hide particular feeds you don’t want to see.

As you use a page, when you mouse over a link you see a brief excerpt from the feed, and then you can decide whether to click through to read the whole thing.

And when you use Alltop, it keeps track of which pages you’ve visited, so you have a built-in dashboard of your feeds.

If you’re already using a feed reader, you may not like Alltop because you’ve chosen your feeds. But if you haven’t really figured out RSS, Alltop is a great way to start. And if you want to help other people get the functionality of RSS without having to learn the lingo, point them to Alltop.

So I guess that for about 90 percent of the Web user world, Alltop provides a tremendous service.

Check out Alltop today!

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Apple Neutralizing Windows Advertising

I saw this great new Mac ad during the baseball playoffs last night, with Apple counter-punching on the Windows $300 million ad campaign:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MimCZikP8cY]

It was interesting that recent Windows ads used a PC look-alike to complain about stereotypes in the Mac ads.

Continue reading “Apple Neutralizing Windows Advertising”

Blogwell Next Week in San Jose

Through my role at Mayo Clinic, I am a member of the Blog Council, and next week we’re hosting an event called BlogWell. The senior execs in charge of social media from these companies are scheduled to speak:

  • Cisco Systems
  • Graco
  • The Home Depot
  • Intel
  • Kaiser Permanente
  • UPS
  • Walmart
  • Wells Fargo

They are going to be presenting case studies on how they do corporate social media, and talking about these topics:

  • Social media ROI
  • Obtaining management buy-in
  • Monitoring the conversation
  • Disclosure
  • Legal issues
  • Video blogging
  • Internal blogging
  • Branding
  • Creating great content
  • Participating in the conversation
  • Blogging in regulated industries
  • Engaging detractors
  • Dealing with negative word of mouth
  • BtoB blogging

The cost of the event is $200. I’m bummed that I won’t be able to attend myself because of a previous family commitment, but one of my Mayo colleagues will be joining the fun. If you’re based near San Jose or can get there on the 28th, I think you’d find this event well worth it.

Here is where you register.

Blogging 205: 5 Easy Steps to a Poll on Your Blog

As I was writing this post at the Ragan conference at SAS, I noticed a new orange button as part of the “Add media” toolbar.

So naturally I “moused over” to see what it was…

Cool!

So here is a series of screen shots as I went step-by-step through the five-step process.

Continue reading “Blogging 205: 5 Easy Steps to a Poll on Your Blog”

A Gem of the Theme

As I was helping Dad with customizing the blog he and his fellow local Republican activists are starting, I spent some time browsing through the free themes available on WordPress.com. That got me thinking I should give SMUG a facelift, so I experimented with a few themes and settled on Sapphire.

I like it because the links stand out better, in a different color than the surrounding text.

It’s really easy to apply different themes, which is a way to get a new look without paying for the Custom CSS upgrade (and without having to know how to edit CSS!)

What do you think of the new look?