World’s worst website man has news for you

AN OBJECT LESSON here for marketers: don’t fall out with journalists just because of a story they wrote about your company. Life’s too short, the guy’s probably a jerk anyway, and if you’re smart you might actually turn a negative into a positive.

Way back then, your reporter penned a short piece describing Truemors as the world’s worst website ever. Shabbily, he also made a nasty, unwarranted remark about the site’s founder, Guy Kawasaki, a man revered in Silicon Valley for his former evangelical role at Apple and as a software sage.

There followed a full and frank exchange of views on email but Mr Kawasaki was big enough to note that the story had directed heavy traffic to the site and to invite us to look at Truemors again after a settling-in period.

Now, Mr Kawasaki asks us to look at a new site that has just launched and we (the royal 'we', no less) are the first to tell you that, yup, it’s actually rather good.

Alltop is a site, or rather a series of sites, that act as aggregators of news.

So, if you want to find out about Britney (and despite what you tell your friends about cultural dumbing down, you really do, don’t you?) and other stars of our age are up to, you go to the Celebrities site. If you care whether it’s that nice Barack or that strangely terrifying Hillary with the liberal finger potentially on the button, you go to the Politics version. And so on for Fashion, Science Sports and so on.

There’s a nice plain text feel about the pages, plenty of room to breathe and none of the cramming-in-as-many-things-as-possible-like-your-gran’s-flat feel that you get on most of the modern interweb.

If you never learned to love RSS but you like Techmeme and it’s gossip dirt rag cousin Wesmirch, you’ll love this. There, Mr Kawasaki, you can put that in your marketing, if you like. Are we friends yet?

One thing though. Alltop is a rubbish name, albeit superior to the wrong-in-every-possible-way Truemors. µ