Improving the Alltop Experience
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I’ve been using Alltop for a while, and have found it to be pretty impressive. First, take a look at this creatively produced 90-second video overview:
Go to alltop.com, and then pick a topic at random. What you see, almost (I’ll come back to that later) as far as your eye can travel on your monitor, is a bunch of headlines from interesting and relevant sources for that topic. If any of those headlines catches your fancy, just move your mouse over it and an excerpt of that article pop ups up. If you like what you see, you can click on it and the full article opens up in a new browser window/tab.
The Alltop team has done a solid job at finding good sources of content, grouping them into relevant categories, and maintaining them over time. It’s great to be able to discover a pageful of quality writers on a given subject at a glance, without having to go hunting for them, one by one, in some blog directory or search engine.
Visually, Alltop is ideal for blog scanning. It packs a ton of content into a small amount of space without getting cramped. I can let my eyes roam free across the page as quickly (or as slowly) as I like, paying as much (or as little) attention as I want to the content by looking or skipping, hovering and finally clicking. This is important — it’s just as easy to find interesting stuff as it is to disregard uninteresting stuff (where interesting may of course mean different things at different times). You end up getting the most out of your time on the site.
Alltop has a customization feature, called MyAlltop, which you can use to add individual feeds from the site to a personalized Alltop page. I have one set up and will probably be expanding it over time. But there are other ways that I get more value out of Alltop, which brings me to the title of this blog post — improving the Alltop experience.
Here’s my favorite way to use Alltop. First, I bookmark all of the Alltop subject pages that I want to follow in Firefox with the subcategory alltop (I actually do this indirectly via del.icio.us tags and bookmark sync). I then click on the subcategory and select “Open All in Tabs”. I maximize my browser window, sit back, and scroll, hover, click and tab my way through the blogosphere 
When I first tried this on my 1920×1200 monitor, I discovered to my chagrin that Alltop limited the display to three columns of text, regardless of the window size. There was no way I could let that get in the way of an otherwise stellar user experience! So I looked through the HTML, found what was causing this limitation, and (largely) worked around it with the Firefox Stylish extension. Stylish lets you customize the style of a web page. It does for CSS what Greasemonkey lets you do on a larger scale with HTML and JavaScript. Here is a Stylish user script that maximizes the number of columns displayed by Alltop for a 1920 pixel-wide screen:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("alltop.com") { #headlines { width: 1700px !important } .row-clear { display: none } }
If the ad in the upper-right hand corner gets in the way, you can hide it with .ad-unit { display: none }. Here’s a screenshot of my Alltop setup with Firefox:
My Alltop Setup (click for full size image)
I picked a well-displayed area for the screenshot, but most category pages end up with some awkward blank spaces due to the browser rendering model. One way to properly fix this would be to query the window size, and recalculate where to insert row-clear tags indicating the end of each row. I think this would be a hugely valuable enhancement for Alltop to add.
Another helpful feature would be the ability to save multiple pages in MyAlltop using predefined category names, or to create your own category pages. Then they could be opened in multiple tabs (supported by either Alltop or the browser).
I find Alltop to be an excellent addition to my toolkit of managing information overload. Sometimes, when I read through a bunch of Alltop pages, I feel like I’ve actually — dare-I-say-it — caught up with the latest thinking on a particular subject. Maybe Alltop can help you get on top of things too.
Category: Technology | Tags: alltop, blogs, css, del.icio.us, feeds, firefox, stylish
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Interesting. For a certain circle of folks, the Twitter handle can be a proxy for a universal identifier, and thus a useful pivot for metadata. And with automation like yours, you could come along later and change that — e.g. by adding alternate ids.
Interesting reading Kartik. How would you see your integration and crowd sourcing approach integrated with services like twist? http://twist.flaptor.com/
I think that any service that wants to associate users with areas of expertise/description could benefit. So for example, a service like Twist might be able to tell not only what topics are trending, but also what types of people are talking about those trending topics. It adds another level of metadata to the mix.
We are alike! FTF was life-changing for me. I haven’t felt a need to read Allen’s GTD — reading the 43folders.com description and the Wikipedia article were enough to get me going. I have 43 folders on my desktop and on my Palm Pre.
In spite of the optimistic view that enterprises can develop internal skills to provide their own technical support for Open Source Software packages, few actually do develop and maintain those skills. Where an enterprise lacks the internal skills to provide its own professional technical support, they need to turn to support providers just as they turned to the proprietary software developers’ support teams. The Open Source Software technical support market is consistently less expensive than comparable cost of support for proprietary products but it remains a legitimate cost that most enterprises need to budget … either in a commitment of internal resources or in a contract with an external provider. Using Open Source Software without a support plan is self-insurance with a potentially large deductible as it can be quite difficult for qualified technical support staff to suddenly get engaged and come to grips with Open Source Software integrated by the enterprise. Furthermore, enterprises need to qualify their support vendors to make sure those providers actually have team members capable of supporting mission-critical software (MySQL, Apache httpd, OpenLDAP, etc.). We agree that enterprises that become internally competent achieve the benefits you suggest but most are unwilling to make the financial commitment to sustain such a capability year on year in the face of business pressures. The technical support specialists will continue to be a valuable service pool for Open Source Software much as they are for proprietary software.
One point that I hope doesn’t get lost here is that even IT organizations that develop internal competence can contract effectively with open source technical support specialists. As I mention:
“They identify where they want to be treated as a customer, where they want to interact as a peer, and where they want to play a leadership role.”
Compared to dependent IT organizations, interdependent IT organizations can make better use of the talents of technical support specialists, since they have a deeper understanding of the value that those companies provide.
Well-put, Kartik! Marty offers a realistic, pragmatic reply. However, I’m seeing my employer dabble with the model that Kartik describes. Our Open Source & Linux Profession (OSLP) runs several development services that benefit our corporation. None of us doing this for the OSLP are IT workers, but we have had conversations with IT. Let’s say that they’re “intrigued” at this point. Could take years. Developing…
Great article Kartik. I think this is a great model. I have seen the power of open and collaborative IT development in my own experience. Unfortunately, I have also seen the difficulty in getting organizations to change their mindset and be open to this kind of approach. It can be done though, it just takes time and some level of trust building. I think the key is to just give it a shot and use small successes to pave the way forward.
[...] Open source leads to interdependent employees (as opposed to dependent or indep) http://kartiksubbarao.com/open-source-and-interdependent-it [...]
Kartik – I like the use of Covey’s model as a way of describing the effect on behaviors (or perhaps the required behaviors) of those that participate in Open Source Software development. Many of the points made here, as you suggest, apply well to the concepts of Open Innovation and may result in similar beneficial outcomes. Nice work.
Likewise, Open Innovation and Open Source share many challenges. In particular, if the decision makers sitting higher up in the food chain are not themselves interdependent, then the ability for folks in lower levels to participate in open models is significantly constrained. In my mind, a key catalyst to moving IT organizations (and others) into a more open mindset is through a top-down approach. There needs to be active encouragement, rewards, and a clear support structure (e.g. support for experimentation, failures, etc.) for folks to “participate” and embrace open principles. Otherwise, the reward system is not aligned with the model presented here and interdependence remains remains relegated to corporate statements.
Great connection to Covey! There is a growing attention in the open source field for the human factor in decision making on open source applications in enterprises. Which is good. Because it is complex to get a yes for Open Source in situations where it can add value. As an Open Innovation Ambassador I have to admit that there is lots of organisations where Open Source Application and its services suppliers network (if any) is not suitable at present.
In cases that we do have a great Open alternative to Closed Environments we have to be patient indeed. We can tell them, we can show them, they will see it, they will hear it, but in the end it is what people believe that makes the difference. Open Source has not yet come to the point that decision makers and IT directors feel backed by the currently available software, the infrastructure and services suppliers. System integration in Open Source sucks big time, if I may be so blunt. There is more. If all the worldwide available Open Source service suppliers would have to service 1% of the enterprises worldwide, we would run short on capacity quickly. It is no use blaming decision makers as long as we ourselves (the Open minded) focus only on the positive effects of Open Innovation.
But we are getting there! Let us shift our attention more towards customers concerns about Open Source. These issues go way beyond software features, staffing and hiring suppliers: e.g. Total Cost of Operation, how to sell it to the boss, smooth integration, network of suppliers, training, and … building trust.
Using open source software is becomming an industry standard, however the most basic questions remain. That is compatibility of various open source licenses, and this is a very big legal issue. Let’s take for example an IT organisation, downloaded a sourcecode with a GPL component or licensed with GNU GPL. Now to make the required innovation it requires an EPL component or licensed using Eclipse Foundation’s EPL. The innovation will not be possible since EPL and GPL are not compatible licenses, meaning that the GPL license conditions are breached and that the originator of the GPL license can sue your organisation.
It made me cry. So many dreams, so many failures, is there really a company out there that can get past the crud and collaborate successfully? If so, hire me.
[...] I Interdependent ? By brunocornec Reading the brilliant article that Kartik Subbarao wrote recently on Open Source and Interdependent IT , I was questioning myself [...]
Very interesting Kartik, as usual. And always inspiring: http://brunocornec.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/am-i-interdependent/
Well written, well developed, well presented thesis, Kartik. As some of my peers on the HP Open Source and Linux Profession leadership team (past and present) have already mentioned, this resonates with our own experience. I experienced a particular moment of recognition in reading your description of the limitations we place on ourselves by reducing all decisions to monetary ones. Many of us in business will identify with the general Catch-22 mindset that says “We can’t develop this capability for the marketplace because there’s no demand, hence, no business justification, no future revenue stream”. (The obvious Catch-22 here is there’s no market because we haven’t developed the products(s) that would helpcreate, or at least grow the market.)
I hadn’t considered the Open Source model from this point of view (interdependence) before, but like so many other ideas that weave the fabric of this development model it seems intuitively obvious in retrospect. I suppose another aspect of this I find personally appealing, if occasionally frustrating, is that it reinforces the notion that this is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a continuum that individuals and IT organizations alike can position themselves along at any given point in time, and change only infrequently appears to happen quickly. But change is the only true constant, and it’s inevitable given sufficient time. We’re making inroads with our own IT organization that will bear fruit, and I suspect we are approaching a tipping point. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
A good model indeed! … Looking at your Dependent-Independent-Interdependent model, it reminds me of a line… “We are taking apart each task and sending it…to whomever can do it best… and then we are reassembling all the pieces.” – from Thomas Friedman’s ‘The World is Flat’. I’m trying to related it to the “Bottom Up” approach this book talks about. Having said that, I worry how so many versions and licences of a open source software (OSS) is maintained and integrated as rightly pointed out by Ian Vernon in his comments. What’s your take on that? What should be any IT organization’s considerations (benefits and losses) before thinking about OSS as a long term strategy if not immediate? Will you agree that any big organization (already having vendor relationship) should not go for OSS in entirety but only where required as this may take some time to mature?
> Looking at your Dependent-Independent-Interdependent
> model, it reminds me of a line… “We are taking apart
> each task and sending it…to whomever can do it
> best…and then we are reassembling all the pieces.”
> – from Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. I’m
> trying to related it to the “Bottom Up” approach this
> book talks about.
Yes, I agree that Tom Friedman does an excellent job of
explaining the emerging realities and possibilities of
the flat world. In fact, this same
delegation/specialization model is very common to Unix,
Linux and many other other open source projects. Good
interfaces defined by open standards, with each component
focused on its particular job, integrated effectively
across the board.
>Will you agree that any big organization (already having
>vendor relationship) should not go for OSS in entirety
>but only where required as this may take some time to
>mature?
I don’t think that open source is an all-or-nothing
proposition, and can certainly be implemented as a phased
approach. Adopting interdependent, open ways of working
throughout the areas of people, process, technology and
business is the broader goal. That will naturally
translate into a strategy of preferring (and contributing
to) open source software, but proprietary software can be
part of the mix too, if its value is well-understood.