Keeping in track with some of my other social media tools and articles, I decided to write a quick FYI on Alltop News Aggregation service. Hopefully some activerainers find it useful and discover some nuggets of wisdom from it. Keeping track of millions of news sources is increasingly difficult, especially if you are not a tech savvy user of the web and don't know how to effectively browse for information.

In many cases, sites like 123SocialMedia and others are becoming information aggregation points where experienced professionals like our staff choose to inform our readers about top information on other sites.

Taking that idea a step further is AllTop, a site that says "We've got all the top stories covered all the time." A simple description of AllTop is that the editors there have pre-assembled hundreds of news feeds from all sorts of sites and presented them on one page.

You can go to the general AllTop.com site to see categories, or you can simply browse a category like social media at http://socialmedia.alltop.com

The site is operated by a small team including Guy Kawasaki, who describes the service as "A good metaphor is that Alltop is an "online magazine rack" that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Think of it as "aggregation without the aggravation.” The screenshot below shows a clean interface that is easy to browse and keep up-to-date with. In my case, my laptop is set to socialmedia.alltop.com as my home page simply to remind me to browse through some of the hot topics every day and keep relevant information fresh on my mind.