Guy Kawasaki is weaving the tale of Alltop on his blog today. We’re biased, of course, but it’s a great story. The initial concept (and implementation) was that of a single topic aggregator. Seven months later, we have more than 200 topics with a new process that will allow thousands more.
Before we get too far, we should explain what the site (or more accurately, sites) is. Alltop is a news aggregator. Each topic draws from credible blog sources to display recent headlines / excerpts without dwelling on the fact it’s fed by RSS. News is kept current and relevant by a small team of humans and robots. These topics are organized under the Alltop umbrella but can be accessed directly or found via a simple search at alltop dot com. Tell it you’re looking for politics, and it gives you politics dot alltop dot com. Simple.
The real story is in the marketing, though. Our last project with Guy was quickly dubbed the Worst Site on the Internetâ„¢. And although, it generated a huge amount of mixed buzz, it doesn’t compare to his latest gig. Alltop tapped into something more like technorati authority or twitter leaderboard standings. People like the site(s), and they want in.
Another story is in the scaling efforts the site required. One of the topics actually has more than a thousand stories at any given time – complete with excerpts and microformats (not that anyone notices). We’ve had to tweak to get it to play nice with the increasing traffic.
We’ve also set up a system to allow the Alltop team easy topic creation and management. I mean, we had one all along, but it involved emailing a nerd who’d then do things manually. We got rid of the nerd.
A few days ago we introduced a brand new landing page to help make finding topics easy. It was overdue – the old site was never meant to organize hundreds of topics. We’re excited about version 2.
Any way, Guy tells stories better than we do. Go check out his post and / or visit Alltop.
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People swear there’s more going on at Electric Pulp than our blog would have you believe. They’re largely correct. Here are some examples:
Mediascapes 2.0
Earlier this year we started work with Hewlett-Packard to re-introduce mediascapes, an immersive media experience for mobile devices. The project is incredible, and we were excited to be involved in the web facet.
Virgin
Last year, we hooked up with Undercurrent to collaborate on a few projects for Virgin. The first of these to launch is Virgin Music, a video blog and music news aggregation site.
Virgin’s a big company, and navigating their site can be difficult. Our next gig, Virgin Explore, aims to make it less so.
Alltop
Guy Kawasaki has a new venture, and we’re happy to report it involves Electric Pulp. Alltop is a network of topics displaying recent headlines and excerpts from the most popular authors / publishers in each vertical. While [perhaps] not for the most RSS/Atom/feed savvy among you, Alltop is on a tear both in terms of traffic and PR. Last week, we read about it in The Wall Street Journal.
Sidenote: Guy’s earlier venture, Truemors, was recently sold to NowPublic.
Cazt
If you’re a casting director, your life just got easier. Cazt lets you manage projects including actor auditions and stakeholder notes. If you’re an actor, you can actually watch your auditions, read direct feedback and more. I don’t want to play favorites, but this is an awesome example of a web application. Pulp is pretty proud of our part.
Elsewhere
By no means is this the full list of what we’ve been up to. We’ve re-released ecommerce sites, recruiting sites, and quite a few more.
In other words, we’re busy. But don’t worry, none of this prevents Max and George from discussing favorite yogurt flavors. Stay tuned.
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Entrepreneur.com has a great interview with Guy K on his motivations behind truemors. No need to retell, but here’s a random excerpt:
There are four tips here: 1) Make friends [with] vendors before you need them, 2) engage a firm that made a similar product, 3) check references after it’s too late, and 4) work with people from the Midwest [Electric Pulp is in South Dakota; PDG is in Oklahoma].
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If you found yourself secretly loving (or loving to hate) Truemors, Guy Kawasaki’s crowdsourcing, rumor aggregating experiment, you might be interested to find out there’s now more to love (or love to hate.)
In general, the new site is better.
Need specifics? Okay…
First off, we’ve added accounts to the mix. Their full purpose will remain a mystery for the moment. Stay tuned.
Next, Truemors now has spam filtering kung fu. You’re familiar (and amazed) with [blog] comment spam filtering? Same thing. Kind of.
Moving on, the site has been redesigned. The primary change you’ll notice is the dead simple topic navigation. Odd posts, Tech posts, Food posts, even the Greatest posts (as voted by the Truemors community) can be quickly isolated for your viewing pleasure.What else? How about Ajax? If you’re one of the geeks that spotted the v1 site’s meta refresh, you might appreciate the new Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater post refresh voodoo. Oh, the power of voodoo.
Is there more? Sure. But I’d rather take a moment to point out that the site is still going strong. Naysayers, doom & gloomers, and CNet will have to wait to stick a fork in it.
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Bob Sutton knows how to spot a jerk. You might even say he wrote the book on the topic (because he did.) And he can help you spot one too, especially if that jerk is you.
You see, Bob also developed a 24 question self-exam to help the world ask themselves the right questions (i.e.: Am I a big jerk?) But the exam needed two things to give it legs. 1) promotion. 2) geekery.
As it turns out, Bob knew a guy. Actually, Bob knew the Guy. And who better to help promote the exam than master evangelist, Guy Kawasaki?
From there, the only thing left was the geekery. Enter Electric Pulp. And soon thereafter, enter the ARSE, an ajax survey built to help the world answer the right questions (i.e.: Am I big jerk?)
And, with 101,209 completions and counting, we’re ready to drop the viral label and announce that this thing has legs.
So, thanks Bob. More than 100k potential jerks are half way through their respective battles.
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In an article titled Candor in the Tech World, Guy Kawasaki speaks to the relative ease in starting a web business. Guy’s newest venture, truemors.com is an experiment in crowd-sourcing. The new blog-like, twitter-like, digg-like rumor aggregator is firing up critics and supporters alike.
Guy opens the curtain on the relatively low costs (compared to dot com bubble era) he’s incurred to launch his new startup and goes on to explain his willingness to roll the dice on stupid ideas with the stakes so low. And stupid idea or no, the site is off to a great start by all measures (visits, pageviews, posts, votes, reviews, techcrunches, naysayers, etc.)
If it hasn’t been made clear, our part in the mayhem was in the design / development category. We’ve worked with Guy on a few previous projects and jumped at the opportunity to shake up the internets with his new idea. If you look closely, you’ll notice we hacked up a wordpress install to allow community posts via web, sms, email or phone. Then we added a voting system, layered in some hacker stops, took it to the roof, and shot it full of lightning.
So, if you’re wondering where the title to this post came from, Guy gives a rolling credit to the ep team in the interview. For the non-subscribers among us, our cameo looked a lot like so:
Mr. Kawasaki says he has been working on Truemors for just three months. Because it uses free software, with programming done by a for-hire outfit called Electric Pulp located in the high-tech mecca of South Dakota, the costs are minimal.
Now, I know what you’re thinking (“I wish I had an ep team to give rolling credits to.”) It’s actually pretty easy really. You just contact us – see where it goes from there.
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Alright, we know our readers are stand-up. This post isn’t for you. But there are others, those who struggle to keep their inner jerk inner. And for them, we offer the ARSE, a 24-question self-exam by Bob Sutton and Guy Kawasaki (and, yes, Electric Pulp.)
Now, we should come clean. We’ve been dancing around using the word asshole in this post – ARSE stands for Asshole Rating Self-Exam. You might be exclaiming “oh my!” right now, and for that, we apologize. But the word was selected very carefully by a Stanford professor, and we expect that makes it right.
The survey corresponds with Bob’s book, The No Asshole Rule. We offer it to the world in hopes of making it a better place.
Guy’s post here.
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It seems like only yesterday that we were blogging about using online assessment tools to make the world a better place, and here it is another day with another example. Today’s featured tool comes in the form of a second aptitude test for hero blogger, Guy Kawasaki.
Perhaps tomorrow’s example could include you. Only time will tell.
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In a recent post, Guy Kawasaki lays out some indicators to help determine if your company is spinning down the path of bozofication. Apparently, the indicators weren’t good enough for our man Michael [ep], who turned it into a Ajaxified calculator at 4am. Guy likes it.
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