Get Overwhelmed by the Internet—in a Good Way

The Internet can be hard to tackle. With the advent of blogs, blog databases like Technorati, RSS feeds and now Twitter, it’s easy to feel swept up in a sea of links. But if you tackle the waves effectively, that information can actually be, well, informative. Here are a few of our favorite inlets.

Popurls, pictured above, is “the original buzz aggregator.” Founder Thomas Marban created a list of curated links from a series of popular Web portals, like Google News, Flickr, Topix and Gawker, and gave each portal its own list. The result is a soothing black background filled with light blue links (you can also tweak the design in the tab at the top of the homepage). Sites are being added to the database all the time, making Popurls a handy index for all manner of Web user.

Alltop was inspired by Popurls. Founder and Web guru Guy Kawasaki took the Popurls model and ran with it, creating categorical indices of the Web that point users to the best URLs on hundreds of topics, specific and general.

Twitter is becoming the preferred way to share links with friends, colleagues and strangers—even celebrities! Fire off a sentence at a time to a growing network of Internet users, and connect with others like you with Twitter-centric services like Twitter Groups.

Bloglovin, mentioned in our previous post about New York Fashion Week, is a growing network of blogs that allows you to track favorite blogs, bookmark posts to read later and add your own blog to the database.

Diigo is the crème de la crème of bookmarking. Diigo’s vast network of users can share and tag links, start groups, highlight parts of articles and attach sticky notes to Web pages using the site’s sophisticated technology. It’s a great place to do Web research, as the bookmarked pages have become a large, annotated database.

For RSS feeds, customer satisfaction for Google Reader is high. Netvibes comes a close second. It has an excerpt option and a "view website" option that lets you see the full page of the feed you're viewing within Netvibes. It also has nifty color coding and a widget-like appearance.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Learn more about RSS feeds, aggregators, blogs, wikis and more in our Web Guide Web Technology: A Primer.

Comments

[Liz]

Yes, I know what you mean. The key is to a) give all your followees a chance and then b) filter them out accordingly. Then c) take advantage of all the third-party services to make better sense of what you get.

[RB]

Cool sites. But for me, the verdict is still out on whether Twitter is overwhelming me in a good or bad way.