NEWS //

A New Way to View Travel News … Sort of

by Mike Richard

Since the relatively widespread adoption of RSS feeds provided by websites around the interwebs, I really can’t imagine getting my daily news fix – travel and otherwise – any other way. It’s like having a digital subscription to every website I love all in one, easy to access place.

That said, a new kind of website has been cropping up over the past year or so that I don’t entirely understand. I’m not sure exactly what you would call these websites. They’re basically just one-page aggregators of dozens of niche RSS feeds.

A good example to help illustrate my point is Alltop.com and its travel niche subdomain: travel.alltop.com, which claims “We’ve got travel covered.” Yes, I suppose they do. A quick glance shows the five latest news stories from scores of online travel news outlets (full disclosure: Vagabondish is among them).

But isn’t this what my RSS reader is for? Feed readers such as Google Reader show all of the latest news stories and/or blog posts that I haven’t read yet and mark them read as I comb through them. It seems that sites such as Alltop.com are a step backward. They may have been a great intermediate step in the days before RSS feeds. But now? What’s the benefit?

What am I missing? Anyone frequently read these types of sites? If so, why?

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Related topics: News

About the Author


Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.

Share Your Thoughts

Sean
April 2nd, 2008

I, too, love my Google RSS feeds. The benefits of something like Alltop at least for me is that it will list sites that i don’t want to subscribe to, but may have some interesting content everyone and a while.

It also helps that it points out popular sites in the same nitch that I might not be aware of.

Guy Kawasaki
April 2nd, 2008

Mike,

Our point is that the vast majority of people don’t want to or can’t figure out RSS feeds and feed readers. If someone asked you how they can follow travel news, is it easier to tell them to go to travel.alltop.com or “go get Google Reader, type in ‘travel’ in Google, look at the 100,000,000 sites Google finds, pick the ones you like, look for the little orange RSS icon, click on that, click on XML, and maybe create folders in Google Reader.”

All this said, I will be happy to remove your feed from Alltop because you think there’s no benefit.

Thanks,

Guy

Mike Richard
April 3rd, 2008

Sean: Yeah, I know what you mean. I guess it all depends on how you read the web. I happen to “bookmark” everything I read – no matter how infrequently – in my RSS reader, but I can understand how that might be cumbersome for other people.

Guy: Good points. I honestly meant no disrespect in asking what the benefit was. Again, it all comes down to how one reads the web. And I can certainly appreciate that not everyone – in fact the majority of internet users – has adopted RSS feeds as part of their daily web routine.

Karen Bryan
April 20th, 2008

I think that Travel Alltop is great, not just because my blog, Europe a la Carte is listed near the top. Travel Alltop offers a simple easy way to scan the recent entries of more than 60 travel blogs. As a non techie person I think that most of the negative comments about Alltop appear to come from techie types who are well versed in RSS feeds who don’t appreciate the benefits of Alltop to a good proportion of current or potential blog readers.

I notice that Mike didn’t appear to take up Guy’s offer to remove the Vagabondish feed from Travel Alltop





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