How to Change the World

The Art of the Tutorial

Over at the American Express OPEN blog, I posted an article called “The Art of the Tutorial.” If you have a product or service that needs explaining, you should read this article (I don’t know many companies that shouldn’t!). Good stuff from my buddies at Atelier Transfert.

Please mark that you found the posting useful at the American Express site if you did.

"MyAlltop" Opens--Features Custom Alltop Pages

“We love the new MyAlltop and think it adds the missing piece to the overall Alltop experience…” Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable

This is the first anniversary of Alltop, the “online magazine rack” that aggregates news by topics. We shipped a new version today; the major new feature is customizable pages called “MyAlltop.”

MyAlltop enables you to select any of the 31,000 sources in 550 topics to create a custom collection of news sources. Then you can re-order the sources and share a unique URL with others.

My MyAlltop page, for example, is My.allltop.com/guykawasaki. Many celebrities have already created pages:

1. Adam Engst of TidBITS. My.alltop.com/adamengst

2. Beth Blecherman of Silicon Valley Moms. My.alltop.com/bethblecherman

3. David Allen of GTD fame. My.alltop.com/davidallen

4. Dave Winer of RSS and Scripting News. My.Alltop.com/davewiner

5. John Battelle of Federated Media. My.alltop.com/johnbattelle

6. Jeremy Gutsche of Trendhunter. My.alltop.com/jeremygutsche

7. Pam Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation. My.alltop.com/pamslim

8. Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist. My.alltop.com/penelopetrunk

9. Tony Hsieh of Zappos. My.alltop.com/zappos

Grab a vanity URL quickly because they are going fast! Click here to get started. Here is a tutorial to help you understand the process.

---

My sincere thanks to the guys at Atelier Transfer

for creating the tutorial, and the truly amazing team at Electric Pulp for creating Alltop. One should be so lucky as to work with teams like these.

More on the Art of Generating Buzz

Over at the American Express Open Forum, I posted a continuation of an interview with Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited. In this post, he explains when to use Facebook and MySpace and offers advice about generating buzz for an online property like Alltop. Check it out if you’re interested in generating buzz for your company.