Anime Alltop Not All News-Oriented

So I was listening to Buzz Out Loud today (episode 813) when heard them read a listener letter that suggested Alltop as a site for people who want homepages with news on a specific subject. I visited their collection of “online magazine racks” and whaddya know, there was an Anime category. The listing shows the latest 5 RSS items from 54 sites, which vary from actual news found on blogs and professionally-run websites to non-news items such as discount sales on AnimeNation and new additions to video streaming sites. I think the latter group should be excluded on the premise that their feeds are merely promotional and not truly informative, but I’m not operating the site, am I?

The site’s FAQ explains how they choose which sites to include on their channels:

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

As they mentioned, you can email them if there is an RSS-enabled site you think should be listed on a particular channel and it will be taken into consideration. Japanator is not currently listed on either the Anime or the Japan channels and Japan Probe is vacant from their “Japan” sub-site so I think some electronic correspondence may be in order.

I like the idea of discovering blogs I’ve never heard of (e.g. Wolf Hurricane) and surveying a single page to get a sense of what’s being talked about, but scrolling down the page each time could become tedious over time. There IS an option to hide unwanted feeds from view and the ability to restore hidden feeds but there is no way to rearrange the order in which the sites are presented so users have to deal with their “highly subjective and judgmental” ordering patterns. (Quote from the same FAQ I linked above.) I might use the site on occasion but I’m not planning making it my start page anytime soon, choosing to stick with about:blank for now.