Online information aggregation without aggravation could be the mantra of new products Alltop and Filtrbox -- polar opposites in all ways except their simplicity of use. Alltop is for those wanting to scan top stories on popular Web sites and Filtrbox, now in private beta, is for anyone whose job depends on efficiently searching and tracking explicit information.

Alltop is the latest idea from über marketer and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki's company Nononina. Alltop is an aggregation of RSS feeds for people who find subscribing to a bunch of individual RSS feeds or using newsfeed aggregators, such as Google Reader, Pageflakes, Alertle, or NetVibes, difficult or annoying.

Alltop is a take-off on Austrian Thomas Marban's single-page aggregator popurls.popurls is where the Web zeitgeist has flowed "as a river of cool" for the past two years attracting about 75,000 visitors daily, Marban said.

Kawasaki, a member of DEMO's Advisory Board, said he got the idea for Alltop when he saw how much traffic his site Truemors got by being posted on popurls.

Alltop uses RSS to import the stories from about 75 popular English language news Web sites and blogs ranging in topics from digerati egos to venture capital. The layout is stark and simple. Each category displays the headlines of the five most recent stories. Place your cursor over a headline, and the first few sentences of a story shows sousers can decide to read it on its source site, or move on. Each category updates every 10 minutes.

Kawasaki chooses Alltop sites by often asking the 6,000 people who follow him on Twitter for recommendations.

"We find or get recommended to blogs and sites. It's a one or a zero or us, either we like the feed or we don't," Kawasaki said.

Currently free of ads and subscription fees, Alltop daily visitors climbed to 10,000 by its tenth day, he said.

"Alltop may be a business. We haven't tried to sell ads yet. Everyone plans on making it a business but that's always up to customers," Kawasaki said.

While Kawasaki adapted Marban's concept, popurls is moving forward by bringing its content to almost any Web-enabled device and by today launching a beta personal recommendation engine that will give users stories based on personal reading habits.

While Alltop and popurls attract those who want a quick scan of what's popular, Filtrbox of Boulder, Colorado is building the next generation of productivity tools - online article search for people who trade in information to earn their pay.

Filtrbox co-founder and president Ari Newman, who has been part of 10 early stage tech start-ups, said the company was born out of frustration.

"One day I declared RSS bankruptcy," Newman said. "I couldn't handle information from all these sources. There's a lot of nice-to-have information on the Web, but often it wasn't the information that mattered to me."

Instead of manually sifting through search results or RSS feeds, with Filtrbox you type in the words or phrases you want to track and a list of articles and suggested keywords appear. You can refine your feeds by choosing from the suggested keywords or adding your own. After that, Filtrbox regularly updates your topics. And you can refine as you go.

Built with Java, Filtrbox uses natural language and text processing along with proprietary algorithms for finding and ranking articles with RSS feeds and other indexed Web information.

"We offer noise-control where most services focus on giving you more to read," Newman said. "This is a function of the explicit and contextual nature of the service and of (our) FiltrRank article scoring. FiltrRank is 'intelligent' as it reacts to which articles you read, find relevant, or don't like - so there is a personal component to it."

FiltrRank scores articles based on popularity, credibility, contextual relevancy, and each user's own feedback.

The company has a "software as a service" (SaaS) business model and will offer free and subscription services (prices yet undetermined). Filtrbox, which plans soon to expand its private beta well beyond its original 250 users, has received $515,000 in seed financing from Flywheel Ventures, True Ventures and angel investors Steve Eskenazi, John Zeisler, David Cohen, and Ron Bloom.