Striving to be the person my dog thinks I am.

When alltop.com was brought to my attention the other day, I set it up as my second tab* on Internet Explorer.  As a result, I quickly discovered the single major flaw with the Alltop strategy — there has to be a reason for it to win the steel-cage-death-match for my browser tabs — and hence my attention. The Alltop home page needs to pull through the single best article from each of the subdomains and put it on the home page under each of the headings, rather than the current enumeration of sites found on the subdomain. Alltop has to be ‘new and different’ every morning when it pops up on its assigned browser tab.

The major challenge for Alltop, therefore, becomes the identification of which ’single best article’ (SBA) to display. There are essentially two ways of doing this.  The first is to approach it editorially, which is to say ‘done by a human being’, and those humans have to do it regularly and often — no less than once per 24 hour day. Furthermore, it implies dealing with the audience for Alltop as an openly homogenous unit. In this age of Digg-like hyperdemocracy — this is counterintuitive, but gutsy and potentially interesting.

The second alternative, of course, is to use an algorithmically-derived choice. The SBA for each subdomain on the home page would be related to my clickstream history from my previous sessions. If I click through to Green, for instance, and subsequently click on articles about plug-in hybrids, it would make sense that the SBA under Green, at least for me, would contain similar articles in my future viewing of the home page. Clickstream history could also determine ranking of subdomain listings on the home page, in which subdomains I click on most bubble up towards the coveted top-left corner of the screen.

In other words, Alltop is my online version of USA Today. The differentiating advantage is each and every day day I receive it, it’s configured a little more like I how to read it. For me, in that imaginary scenario, Business would eventually become Section A, World News Section B, and a smattering of other subjects in Section C and beyond.

All of the above could be accomplished without messing with the aesthetic of the Alltop design, which is clean and crisp. Top marks to Alltop for eschewing all the gadgets and advertising that really mess up otherwise simple, clean designs. It’s not quite as austere as Google, but thankfully lacks the visual clutter that portals tend to accumulate over time.

It’s not immediately clear how Alltop monetizes, but is seems like the algorithmically-derived SBA, and subdomain ranking, would provide a very rich contextual description of the Alltop viewership. I still don’t know exactly how you turn that into money, but I’m sure the brain trust at Alltop can work that one out. However, suffice to say that a bunch of advertising showing up on the home page — even if it was advertising that was contextually sensitive to me — would be about as welcome as my next iPod showing up with an advertisement for Vodaphone etched on it.

When I discovered RSS feeds, I immediately became an RSS feed junkie, and just about as quickly, I ran into the problem of simply not having the hours in the day to keep up to date with even the article summaries. I need to winnow down the flow into something into something more manageable. It seems like Alltop has begun to chip away at that issue, and assuming it finds a successful formula in this regard, I would say it’s future is pretty bright.

*Winner, and still champ — Google