Vote on legislation. Flame your legislators. You know, participate in democracy. (There’s some ep love in there, btw.)

The Alltop press release went out yesterday and was met with an extremely active response. Michael Arrington even took the time to cover it on TechCrunch, again.

Not surprisingly, Arrington didn’t like it. (Millionaire tech bloggers aren’t really the target use group.)

A few things do surprise me, though.

First, Arrington pulled the post. Then he put it back up. He twittered about it eight or so times.

The post has also generated all kinds of audience discussion, both on the site (105 comments at last count) and on twitter. Much of this coming from busy people well outside the target market.

I’m writing about it for two reasons. One, we built it. Two, I’m again amazed at Guy K’s ability to generate attention.

This is a very light RSS play, and some of the sharpest tech bloggers are covering it. Some are in such a rush to weigh in that their posts are coming out as jibberish. Jeremiah’s analysis stated it was built using Thomas Marban’s existing code and that Guy was an investor in popurls. (He has since revised the post.) News to Thomas. And at least one small mind has commented that the developers over-charged for the build (some even blog it that way). News to me. Electric Pulp didn’t charge to build Alltop.

Anyway, there’s a story in all this. But I don’t think anyone has picked up on it yet.

And, for what it’s worth, the unadulterated love being thrown at Alltop from outside the inner circle of geeks is wild. (Still not the story.)

Last night we launched a topic-based feed aggregator with Guy Kawasaki. The technology making Alltop go won’t draw much attention from friends in the industry — we all but ignore personal relevancy at this point. But then there’s the Egos thing.

One of the topics aggregates posts from a mix of prolific bloggers and well-known personalities. The Egos title is intentionally baiting - Guy’s expecting a pretty specific reaction. “You’re pissed off if you’re on the list. You’re pissed off if you’re not.”

Off the record, I wouldn’t be too pissed to be on it. Some of the authors came out of my own reading list, and they weren’t included for their arrogance.

We also skipped over a lot of web types to keep the list from leaning too far towards web and overlapping what Thomas Marban is doing at popurls. So, I wouldn’t be too pissed if I’m not either.

Greg Storey isn’t in there yet, so there has to be at least a bit of human error.

As Greg mentioned earlier in the week, the web industry is slammed. Everyone I talk to tells it the same — nobody can keep pace with demand.

Outside the industry, that’s called a good problem to have. Inside it, it’s frustrating. As the work becomes less and less mechanical, the effort required to find the right people becomes more and more difficult. The mindset to differentiate between done and done right has become as important as the skill set itself.

We’re losing someone who differentiates. (Jason is going startup mode.) So, once again, we’re experiencing the effort.

Which brings me back to the post at Airbag. Greg’s proposing a simple curriculum could help people *new* in the industry improve. It’s a great idea. Anyone who cares enough about the craft could benefit from something like this. An important side effect would be knowing who really does (care).

Maybe it would make finding the right people a little easier.

Tonight we rolled out one of the reasons for my post lag. I mentioned earlier (kind of) that we’ve been working on something for Stephen Colbert. As of a few minutes ago, It’s live.

MakeMeAmerica.com

This is the first project to launch since a recommendation from Guy K spiked our requests in June. That recommendation plus some attention from the design galleries helped get us involved in some pretty exceptional projects - can’t wait to launch a few more.

More info on the site here.