The Wisdom of One: Guy Kawasaki On Alltop.com - Page 4

So far we’ve removed only a handful of sites because of low quality. However, three sites asked to be removed because they were Irish — it’s a long and funny story. And three sites asked to be removed from Moms.Alltop so that they could be be on Allmediocre.com — which is another long and funny story.

We at Blogcritics are certainly proud to be new inductees to the Alltop "magazine rack." What in particular caught your eye and made you say, "Yeah, we need to add them"?

Gina Ruiz told me that you have good stuff. If it’s good enough for someone as knowledgeable as Gina, it’s good enough for me. How’s that for an objective criteria? This is more “wisdom of one” in action.

With Alltop's appeal among journalists and researchers, who best benefit from having its content sorted by topic or field, do you see it becoming an accepted popular research tool down the road? Wikipedia has a stigma against it for being all user-created content and thus not entirely reliable, but if Alltop is featuring blogs — whether written by experts or not — doesn't it run the risk of also being lumped in as a non-authoritative source, perhaps even a hub of hearsay?

Many journalists, researchers, and PR folks use Alltop to scan topics. This is very flattering because they are the “pros.” If Alltop becomes a de facto research tool for people really in the know, it smells like very high CPMs to me. Plus, I’m praying that there is a trickle-down effect.

Regarding Wikipedia, I’d be thrilled if we got the same “stigma.” That’s a “high-quality problem.” I fantasize about Alltop being mentioned in the same breath as Wikipedia. If you know how to achieve this, let me know.

Some of the sites included on Alltop.com are reporting that their traffic hasn't really changed since they were added, yet Alltop is presently about 30,000 spots higher than PopURLs in Alexa.com's traffic rankings. Are people just not clicking through? At what point do you think Alltop's upswing in traffic fails to convert to clicks for the destination sites?

First of all, I wouldn’t believe Alexa or any other site that purports to accurately report traffic. The truly objective and conservative measurement is Google Analytics, but site owners keep GA stats secret because they are much lower than the lies they tell.

As for sites not getting a lot of traffic from Alltop, there are several factors at work. First, they could write better headlines. Alltop is a great equalizer, so one has to write good headlines that attract clicks. Second, they could write better lead paragraphs because we display these on a mouseover — boring first paragraphs mean people don’t click through. Third, I hate to tell you, but Alltop isn’t generating millions of page views per day. It’s only six months old. It’s growing, but it’s not “there” yet, so it’s not surprising that many sites aren’t getting tons of traffic by being on Alltop.

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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