Alltop :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

The Top Sites page on this site now has news aggregated from leading sites about work from home

"Top Sites - news from home based business related sites"

Recent visitors to this site may have noticed an innovation, with the Top Sites page showing feeds from a number of sites.

What prompted me to set this up was my frustration on a few occasions in trying to find interesting and informative sites on home based business.

There was no shortage of sites on or about working from home, but it was a chore ploughing through the ones which were very basic in terms of content and essentially just promo sites for specific products or landing pages for an MLM business (not that there’s anything wrong with that, just not the content richness I’m looking for).

So I decided to set up an aggregation site here on Thinking Home Business, along the lines of Popurls and Alltop. Hence Top Sites.

The explanatory note on the Top Sites page reads:

This page incorporates RSS feeds for sites related to home based business. It is a work in progress. While I would like to build up over time a substantial set of feeds from useful and/or interesting sites, I am not in a hurry. I should say also that my decisions will be guided largely by my quite subjective views about relevance and quality. Maybe I’ll make up some guidelines on that. In the meantime, if you know of a site which you feel would be a good inclusion here please let me know via the Contact page. That could be your own site.

I’m pleased to say that the first sites to be listed here are all high quality sites and I look forward to adding more progressively.

In fact, I’m wondering why I didn’t do this a while ago.

Actually, given that the home based business sector is so huge, well established and fast growing, I’m surprised there is not a page on Alltop for sites focused on the sector. But when I searched today the only category that came up for a search on “home” was Home Automation. I’ve been a fan of Alltop pretty much since it launched and my Des Walsh dot Com site has been featured there on the Social Media pages, but to this day there is no evident sign of any interest in sites to do with working from home, working at home, or home based business.

Maybe it would help if I submitted this site to Alltop and proposed a new category?

In the meantime, I’ll get on with the job here.

As I say on the Top Sites page, if you have a site to do with working from home or know of one, and think it would work well here, please let me know – contact details here. Please understand that, at least at this early stage, I’m going to be terribly subjective about what goes in and what doesn’t. It’s not for nothing that the title of this post refers to My Top Sites (not The Top Sites) although naturally I hope the selection will meet with the approval of well-informed folks.

There is an excellent new resource for anyone who wants to get a quick, interesting overview of current online coverage of their favorite topic. It has various sections, including one devoted to sites focused on Small Business.

It’s called Alltop and is the invention of online entrepreneurs Will Mayall, Kathryn Henkens and Guy Kawasaki. It’s a kind of super aggregator of news and commentary from the web.

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

For a lot of us, the first flush of enthusiasm for the brave new world of information brought to us via the Internet, on any topic, always on, at any time, has faded to a lesser or greater degree. We now know we do not like being overwhelmed with information. We want to be selective.

Question is, how? We have probably tried various aggregation tools and now we find that even they can quickly get overloaded.

And as a daily reminder to me of just how easy it is for that to happen, my current favorite among feed readers, FeedDemon, has a Panic Button, enabling me to “mark as read” batches of items when it looks as if I have acquired more items to read than I am likely to be able to deal with.

FeedDemon panic button

Will Alltop solve our aggregating and filtering problems? Maybe not, but I’m finding it an interesting and stimulating addition to my filtering/classifying toolkit.

The Small Business category of Alltop includes a range of sites, from Entrepreneur.com and the Duct Tape Marketing blog, through to sites such as the rather quirky, definitely high energy and also informative bukiki.com – tag “living the best life – ONLINE” and the ever-challenging and ever-practical Jill Konrath’s Selling to Big Companies.

There are so many good, information-packed, idea-stimulating sites in the Alltop Small Business section that just making that selection of examples in the previous paragraph was not easy. I felt like a kid in a candy shop, unable to make up my mind which treats to sample.

Rather than try and cram more into this post, I’ve decided to schedule a regular weekly (maybe more often,we’ll see) visit to Alltop’s Small Business category and pick out some sites and blog posts that I find particularly interesting – preferably relevant to the work from home professional – and post about them here. I have a hunch that I won’t run out of material quickly, if at all.

(In the interest of transparency: as of a couple of hours ago, one of my sites has been listed on Alltop, in the Social Media section.)