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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Another way to focus your attention

I don’t know how I missed this, but thanks to Dave Winer‘s latest Morning Coffee Notes podcast, I’ve learned about and become an instant fan of Top 10 Sources.

Winer interviewed John Palfrey yesterday for MCN. Palfrey is founder and publisher of the site; he’s better known as director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The idea behind Top 10 Sources is simple. A staff picks a topic, then culls through blogs and podcasts to identify the top 10 sources in that subject. The Yahoo!-like index of topics makes it easy to find the subject you’re interested in. Under “Health and Science,” for example, you’ll find Women in Science, Environment, Yoga, Women’s Health, Astronomy, Science News, Weight Loss and Controversial Science. A new topic is added daily.

Click to the topic page and you’ll find an introduction from the editor who pulled together the sources followed by the latest posts from each of the 10 identified blogs/podcasts. I checked the Guitars listing under Music, and found a truly useful set of blogs. The posts are listed in “river of news” style, with each page serving as a feed aggregator. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for each page, pulling the updated contents of each topic into your own news reader; alternatively, you can get the OMPL file to update your OPML reader on a daily basis.

The home page is handled a lot like Wikipedia, with different featured topics appearing every day.

In a press release, Palfrey said:

Top 10 Sources is about adding a human element to searching and sorting through the increasingly great syndicated content on the Web. Much like Yahoo! brought a hierarchy to the early days of the commercial Internet with its browser, Top 10 Sources organizes information in blogs, podcasts, wikis, photoblogs and other sources into ‘reading lists.’ The goal is to foster an active conversation among readers, authors and editors that is about, and results in, great online content with context.

The site launched in early December, so it’s not surprising that the Business category is anemic (Venture Capital and Your Money are the only two topics listed so far), but I expect that’ll change as new subjects continue to be added. In the MCN interview, Palfrey also promised that editors would keep an eye on the topics, deleting sources that lose their relevance and adding new ones that rise in prominence. It’s a site—and an idea—to keep an eye on.

01/03/06 | 5 Comments | Another way to focus your attention

Comments

  • 1.This is a great idea - it's evolving a bit like general search did I think. They started with machines, and then they went onto human directories, and then moved back into more intelligent ways of searching/auto-sorting.

    We are actually working on a gadget that sits on the desktop and helps people focus their attention by subscribing to any feed they like, but then allows them to set various rules that bias the importance of each item. The gadget then chooses the right way to alert the user based on the importance of that item. For example a really important item might generate an alert that follows the mouse cursor around for a few seconds. A non-important/generally interesting item might just stay on the persistent news-ticker that sits on-top of the desktop while they work.

    I thought this might be an interesting way to get some people's head of the feedreader all day and back to some productivity while still keeping up to date - or not haha.

    If anyone is interested, you can find out more at http://www.touchstonegadget.com

    Chris - Touchstone Gadget | January 2006 | Australia

  • 2.Well, I tried getting the rss feeds for a few of the sections within Top10 to work with GreatNews and Bloglines and could not get it to work. Any clues gratefully received. Copying and pasting the RSS shortcut links didn't do it...

    Interestingly, this site may pip Seth Godin's new project to the post. He's still in beta for a similar but different type of aggregator to Top10. Be interesting to see if Top10 steals his thunder (and mine too, as I'm a beta tester).

    Lee | January 2006 | Adelaide

  • 3.I ran into the same problem, Lee. I've notified them.

    Shel Holtz | January 2006 | Concord, CA

  • 4.Corante Network contributors are coming back to their blogs from holiday hiatuses. Here's a roundup of recent great posts that were not otherwise commented upon: Shel Holtz at a shel of my former self calls our attention to an attention-focusing...

    http://marketing.corante.com/editorial/archives/20 | January 2006

  • 5.Seems like a very good idea. You get all the latest news on whichever topic you are interested in. That way it is much much easier to keep up with the topic at hand. Very good idea.

    David Murphey | February 2008 | Australia

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