Alltop.com "online magazine rack" launches

The launch of Alltop.com has been announced by startup guru and former Apple PR mastermind Guy Kawasaki. Alltop is a new website that aggregates media from many online sources.

Today on Kawasaki's blog he wrote:

A good metaphor is that Alltop is an "online magazine rack" that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page.

Alltop carves up their information space in a somewhat unique way, starting with the following categories: work, living, people, interests, culture geekery, good (!), and news

These categories in turn each have several subcategories such as "autos", "egos", and "small business".

Within the subcategories you find dozens of blogs and online news sources arranged in what seems like a very haphazard way. Posts from these sources are listed below them and popups allow you to scan the stories. I'm not at all clear yet about what determines who appears where and why.

After my first few tests of Alltop I'm really not enjoying what I see as cumbersome navigation with popup boxes and an ocean of text content which seems to me harder to scan than it need be. However I sure like the idea of a fast way to scan the most prominent blogs and media for the latest stories. For technology news I certainly prefer TechMeme, which offers stories as well as comments about those stories.