09 Jul 2009, Posted by christie in Misc Bytes, 0 Comments

There’s My Alltop then there’s my REAL Alltop

Yesterday I was reading Chris Brogan’s blog during lunch and learned about Alltop, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. I’d never heard of it before, but I quickly set up an account and started picking some sources I want to be able to browse during lunch when I eat at my desk. The thing about Alltop is, whatever items you pick and save for yourself on a custom page are also visible to others, using the link http://my.alltop.com/USER-NAME-HERE. So you can see pages with news sources selected by Problogger or ChrisBrogan or anyone else whose user name you know. That’s nice, of course, because it’s another way for us to learn from them. But it dawned on me – for an account using my real first and last name, it’s obvious I should select only the most scientific or math-oriented sites to follow, because anyone who’s ever heard of me might easily check My Alltop.    And news sources with just the facts shouldn’t get me into too much trouble.   These days you never know who’s looking, and at least until you retire you need to remember to manage your online presence, including Twitter, Facebook, and really anything that’s viewable and searchable by the public.

For my real Alltop page, I created an account with the name MiscBytes and picked the how-to blogs and the pet blogs that I’m really going to look at for some fun during my lunch. Hey, you could easily create a “crap I don’t want anyone to know I read” account as well as a “career” account – as many accounts as you want, as far as I know. At any rate, Alltop really is nice – you can browse topics to find your  news sources and maybe even find a few you didn’t know about. Plus it allows you to see the most recent headlines of your chosen sources, and if you mouse over a link, you will see a really generous preview of the story. Give Alltop a try. But remember we can see Your Alltop!