SF/F/H RSS News Digest via Alltop.com

Here's a website that genre bloggers, readers and fans might want to check out (which I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere just yet).

In a mediabistro.com interview posted yesterday, tech-evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki talks about his latest project: an RSS aggregator by the name of Alltop.com that aims to provide a news-gathering service for anyone who doesn't have the time, inclination or know-how to set up their own, bespoke feed-list via a service such as Google Reader.

Alltop.com gathers RSS feeds into themed sections, the aim being to provide as wide an overview of the activity within a particular area of interest as possible, rather than a topic-specific drill-down. Kawasaki explains:

"Think of it as a digital magazine rack. If you went to a newsstand you would see racks of sports magazines, celebrity magazines, car magazines, wine magazines, and food magazines; we have our own virtual rack where we aggregate the Web sites and blogs of the top feeds for each of those topics, and we show the latest five headlines from each source."

I checked out Alltop's genre coverage and sure enough, there's a well-developed and densely-populated section that focuses on science fiction / fantasy / general genre blogs at sff.alltop.com as well as more general books- and writing-related sections (books.alltop.com and writing.alltop.com) that may also be of interest.

Speaking as someone who's spent a fair fair amount of time over the last eight months compiling my RSS-subscription list of genre bloggers, to help me track online coverage of Orbit authors and titles, I really could have done with finding this site round about last May...