Alltop | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

In response to suggestions raised in the #hcsm group discussion on Twitter, Alltop has created a new site, hospital.alltop.com, that aggregates RSS feeds of news releases from several top hospitals. You might want to bookmark or “favorite” it.

For people working in healthcare public relations, it’s a good way to see at a glance what kind of news your peers are releasing. It’s also a good news source for others interested in healthcare news. Besides Mayo Clinic, other institutions featured at launch include University of Maryland Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, Sutter Medical Center, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Aurora Health Care and about 20 others.

If you’re unfamiliar with Alltop, check out my earlier post, “Alltop: RSS without the RSS.”

Thanks to @guykawasaki and the Alltop team for creating this site, and to Tom Stitt (@tstitt) for his leadership in helping to make it happen.

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!

Tag: Alltop

Alltop Releases New Top Hospital News Site