Blog & News Dashboard Sites Don’t Work for Me

There are several "blog dashboard" type services out there right now. I, personally, have loaded up an iGoogle page with feeds and have a Netvibes (Ginger) account with tab after tab of bloggy goodness. For me, these two work because they let me customize my pages with the feeds and other widgets I want to see. However, the majority of my time is still spent in Google Reader, or lately, on FriendFeed, for discovering and reading news.

But unlike these customized resources, other sites just want to throw all the news at you, like you’ve visited one big online magazine rack. In the past, I’ve checked out sites like Popurls, Original Signal, and Alltop, all of which do a pretty good job at aggregating the top stories from around the web. But for me, these sites just don’t do it.

And then I see a post by Kelby at BloggingTips that gives Alltop a positive review, even saying the site is keeping her away from Bloglines. I’m actually rather shocked by this. How could a blogger who blogs about blogging be into this? I don’t get it.

So I looked at Alltop again.

I still don’t get it.

I mean, isn’t the best thing about RSS its ability to let you pick and choose your own feeds, your own slice of the web? Isn’t it designed so you don’t have to visit web sites? For me at least, that’s like the whole point.

Am I missing something?

Now, back when Michael A. dissed Alltop, calling "a big pile of nothing", I took that with a grain of salt. For all I knew Alltop’s creator, Guy Kawasaki, just pissed Mike off and this was revenge. (It’s not like you can count on TC anyway – I mean, they didn’t even get FriendFeed, you know?)

No, Alltop, Popurls, and the like are not, in fact, big piles of nothing. They’re big piles of news instead. Unfortunately, for me, this isn’t much better. I don’t want all the news, I want *my* news. I want all my news. Sometimes it is a bit much though, so unlike Louis Gray (an info addict!), I occasionally "mark all as read." But that’s what FriendFeed is for. Besides, if the news is that important, it will find me. 

So who is Alltop et al. for then?

It seems like the goal of many of these types of services is to bring RSS to the masses by removing it from geekery like RSS readers and providing users with a home page to visit instead. But this isn’t going to work for the masses, and here’s why:

Those guys don’t want a homepage for reading the news via blogs and RSS feeds – they already have a homepage with the news – and let’s be honest, it’s probably CNN, MSN, AOL, or Yahoo.

I mean, hello, I’m from IT. I’ve seen the homepages. They’re quite boring.

How would these people ever hear of Alltop?