[chrisbrogan.com]

Posted: 30 Nov 2008 01:30 AM PST

Guy Kawasaki isn’t just the author of Reality Check, his latest nifty book about kicking your competition’s butt. He’s a tinkerer and entrepreneur. I’ve been in love with his Alltop since it first came out ( I first talked about Alltop here). As time goes on, I think of more ways to use the service.

Tonight, for instance, I got curious about search engine optimization (SEO). I thought about googling the term, but realized that would dump me into lots of commercial products, software, and worse. So, I thought about Alltop. I typed in http://seo.alltop.com, and it popped up all the various search blogs out there. Instantly, I had what I needed.

I spoke with Guy about this recently, just how much it’s changed the way I blog, and the way I research. We thought about how else it might empower bloggers, and here’s what we came up with:

Top 10 Ways Alltop Powers Bloggers

Keep track of what your competitors are writing about. Alltop displays the last five stories of over one-hundred sites and blogs for topics ranging from adoption to zoology with 400 topics in between>
Examine the site design of bloggers in your category by clicking through on headlines and seeing their sites. For example, if you’re a mommy blogger, you can see what hundreds of mommy blogs look like at Moms.alltop.
Get more traffic by getting added to an Alltop topic. Go here to sign up.
Grab blogging tips by reading what expert bloggers like CopyBlogger and ProBlogger are saying at Blogging.alltop.
Stay on top of what’s happening in SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media, and corporate blogs.
Stay on top of what the big personalities like Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Tara Hunt, and Dave Winer are saying at Egos.alltop.
Compare the quality of your headlines to other bloggers’ headlines. If your headlines don’t stand out in Alltop, they won’t in any feed reader.
Keep track of what’s happening on Twitter by monitoring the top one hundred Twitter personalities on Twitterati.alltop
Find story ideas from other areas. For example, you can find a study about psychology and then blog about how people can apply it to marketing.
Provide fresh content to your readers with no hassle by installing an Alltop widget in your sidebar. These widgets deliver the five most popular stories of the day from 400 topics. (This one was one of Guy’s. I haven’t installed one yet. Have you?)

So that’s our list. There are all kinds of other things I use it for, like finding out where I should be commenting more, and discovering what I might want more information about. It hasn’t let me down yet, and with the passionate team Guy has working on keeping the Internet’s best magazine rack well stocked, I feel like it’s not going to stop serving me up stuff to read any time soon.

Are you using Alltop in other strategic ways? Have you used it as a way to share your stuff with less tech-centric friends or business colleagues? What else should be on my list?

2008 Holiday Buying Guide

Posted: 29 Nov 2008 09:34 PM PST

Okay, I tried this the other day, but somehow couldn’t embed it neatly. So instead, I’ve rebuilt the entire guide off-site at Amazon directly.

If you have some social media types on your holiday list, or if you’re looking for a way to spend some of those gift cards that people buy because they have no idea what you really like, and really don’t know you well enough to buy you anything personal, get back at them, by buying your own stuff from this store I set up.

Yes, if you buy $1.5 Million worth of products, I’ll get a few dollars some day. (sorry, Darren).

Here’s my 2008 Holiday Buying Guide.

Anything interesting? Anything catch your fancy? Was it worth it to go through and put all those things together in one place?

(Special thanks to Ed Shaz for showing me this nifty widget:)

All Tomorrows Armies

Posted: 29 Nov 2008 06:30 PM PST

Today, we wonder how newspapers survive. Today, we wonder how the music industry will survive. Today, we wonder how GM and Ford and the rest of the US auto industry will survive. We worry about a lot of larger scale creations.

We used to worry about larger computers. We no longer do. We used to worry about sharing information. We no longer do. We used to worry about small voices being lost in the shuffle. We used to worry about a lot of things.

Tomorrow (and I mean the day after you read this), we already are equipped with the most robust and least expensive toolset for communications that the world has ever seen. We possess massive distribution networks for free. We are all Gutenberg. We are all Murdock. We are all available and ready.

Why do we seem scared? Because the money didn’t follow the distribution lines the same way as it did with the other media (news, radio, TV, movies). But maybe that’s not where we need to get our money from this next time.

Tomorrow (and I mean the day after you read this), we are modular. We are fighting smaller wars. We are reporting smaller news. We are having simpler conversations. We are the dial tone. We are the movie theater.

Yes, bigger things will still loom. Yes, there will be those stories and issues that need the largest stage possible. This cannot and should not change.

But as for you and me, it becomes our job to atomize everything. Make components. Break it all down. From your text to your video, share and make share-able. Point out the good things. Give every piece a network. Deliver every piece to the outposts. Forget the home base. Forget the fleet. Make and launch pirate ships in all directions and seek out the gold (=goal, =whatever you think is worth sailing for).

Stay with the old at your own risk. All tomorrow’s armies are equipped and ready to embed. We don’t need to gather. We have our own dial tone. We connect and disband the way waves shape the beach.

Or not.

Photo credit, Dade