Branding as a topic is not as big as marketing or advertising. People associate it with the same fields, but they don't regard branding as an important topic.

At one side, that's pretty normal. It's actually how it should be, because regular people aren't actively thinking about brands, even though they are more influenced by them than they are aware of. On the other side, in this digital age, where the consumer power rises and the general model of business is beginning to change, it is quite astonishing that not a bigger number of people seems to be interested in brands. After all, this is at the roots of business, and it is changing the economy right now.

Brand Streams are the next generation of branding, and it is already happening. I started talking about this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago and I intend to continue writing about it for the upcoming months. Because I think Brand Streams are not just a theory (it is for now), but really a simple model which we can study, explore more and find examples for, to understand the principles of modern branding, to learn from it and to draw practical conclusions on how we can improve our brand's life-cycle.

The best blogs on all topics

Today, Core has been accepted by Alltop, a search service that aggregates and lists good content from blogs on the Web. Alltop aggregates these blogs and adds them to topic lists, which are ranging from entertainment over culture to geeky topics, from food over music, to travel, work, health, culture, technology or—you guessed it—branding.

In Alltop's own words:

You can think of Alltop as the "online magazine rack" of the web. We've subscribed to thousands of sources to provide "aggregation without aggravation." To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points--they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you're already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn't know existed.

Here's how some other people have explained Alltop. First, Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures, used these three pictures to explain Alltop vis-à-vis Google. Second, read the review by Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb. In a nutshell, Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.

Alltop's founder

Alltop was founded by Guy Kawasaki, author of the blog How to change the world. He has worked for Apple twice, founded a Garage Technology Ventures, a startup venture capital company, wrote nine books and built Alltop, which I think is pretty awesome.