The Wisdom of One: Guy Kawasaki On Alltop.com - Page 3

I’m very open-minded about “unintended uses,” and I don’t want to be a hypocrite because I Twitter to promote Alltop, too. There is just as much danger in letting a small group of people decide what is “evil” as there is in letting it all hang out. Between the two, I’d always pick the latter. Hence, I believe in “letting a hundred flowers blossom” because you just never know what will happen — often times good comes from unexpected origins.

Some have criticized Alltop for being sort of "what Guy wants you to read," in that you and the staff determine and perhaps editorialize what's "worth reading." How do you respond to that, and are there any sort of absolute objective criteria used when determining what deserves to be here?

To be accurate, it is what Guy, our staff, and people on Twitter like to read, and we’re proud of it. Is this any worse than what “the crowd wants to read” or what the chosen fifty of Digg want to read? Honestly, I’m not a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd at all.

Certainly Apple doesn’t listen to the crowd. It leads the crowd — that’s Steve’s magic. There is no absolute criteria at Alltop — some feeds bring us credibility (for example, the Washington Post in Politics.Alltop), some are undiscovered gems that we want the world to know about (for example, Stuff White People Like in Humor.Alltop, and some feeds are the work of people who have helped us. One of our tenets is, “We take care of our friends.”

In this way, Alltop is highly subjective and idiosyncratic, and we’re proud of this, too. Hopefully we’re not deluding ourselves, but we think that our selection of feeds and the order in which we display them is a key added value of Alltop. In the worst case, if readers disagree with our selection, they can click on “hide” and the offending feed is gone for them.

Related to the previous question, using a gut reaction in part to determine whether a site is worth including, has your gut ever led you astray? Have you ever had to remove a site from Alltop because the content went downhill quickly, or a hunch didn't maximize on its potential?

I’m sure we’ve been wrong. When you aggregate approximately 10,000 feeds, we’re bound to make mistakes. We do have several systems in place. First, if a feed doesn’t have anything new for twenty eight days, it “disappears” until there is a new posting. Second, we’re very open to reader feedback — I consider the “wisdom of one” who cares enough to comment to be very valuable.

Article Author: Mark Buckingham

Mark Buckingham is not only BC's Sci/Tech Editor-In-Geek, but also an avid freelance writer, gamer, techhead, reader, movie watcher, pianist, and hockey player.

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