AllTop has been around awhile.

It’s a “news aggregator” – it identifies a number of topics and then creates pages on them with updated stories from different sites specializing in those topics. The stories are updated by RSS feeds which, prior to the advent of social media ten years ago, which was the way a ton of people consumed Web content. It’s still around, and many of us use feed readers like Feedly to still use them, but its popularity is vastly diminished.

Even though I have known about AllTop for years, for some reason I had not been aware that, in addition to their creating pages on individual topics, it also allows anyone else to create their own personal page for free.

Its personal pages basically serves as version of a feed reader – with a few major differences. One, it’s primarily designed to be public (though it can be made private). Two, if it doesn’t already have an RSS feed for a site on one of its pages, you have to actually go out and find the feed (in most feed readers, they find it for you). And, three, its design is set up so you can put all your feeds on one page and quickly peruse them in a minute or so. It’s the first and third point that make it particularly attractive to me. Perhaps other feed readers offer similar options, and I’m just not aware of them.

So, I have created my own AllTop page which includes the feeds from most major education news sites and blogs that I read, and other non-education sites that I regularly explore.

I’m going to organizing them a little more carefully when I have time, but I like it a lot because I can check out the sites once-a-day quickly. I’ll still be using Feedly for the most important sites because I won’t miss a single article that way. But I think Alltop page will save me time and, perhaps, others might find it helpful.

Let me know what you think and feel free to offer suggestions of other sites I should add to it.

Again, here’s the link.