Tame RSS Feeds with AideRSS
December 20th, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 4 CommentsTweet This
I’ve watched a bunch of people go through the same arc with RSS use. It starts with reading more and more web sites online, and realizing you’re spending too much time loading things into your browser. Then you discover RSS, and find that it saves tons of time. Over the following months, your list of subscribed feeds grows from 20 to 100 to 250. You brag about how many feeds you follow. And then one day you realize that, once again, you’re spending too much time trying to keep up.
We’ve covered various strategies for getting an RSS addiction under control, but free service AideRSS has a new approach. They’ve come up with a measure called “PostRank” that they can apply to individual RSS items to determine which one are the most interesting. The actual algorithm is proprietary, but it appears similar to Google’s PageRank, taking into account things like comments, incoming links, number of Diggs, times an item has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, and so on.
The interesting part, of course, is what they do with this measure. Go to their site, enter the URL of a blog or a feed, and click the “Analyze” button. You’ll get – very quickly – a breakdown of individual items into “good posts,” “great posts,” “best posts,” and “top 20,” along with links and statistics. Better yet, you also get RSS icons to subscribe to individual filtered feeds. For example, if you want to keep some eye on, say, SlashDot but don’t want to wade through everything in their busy RSS feed, you can use AideRSS to subscribe to a filtered feed of only the best posts on SlashDot.
Using AideRSS, you can customize your interest and depth level for each feed you follow. So if you get overloaded with feeds, rather than taking an axe to complete feeds, you can carefully prune to remove traffic and still keep an eye on things across a broad range of interests.
They also provide a couple of JavaScript widgets that you can embed on your own weblog. For example, here are the most popular WWD posts for the last month, as measured by their PostRank system:
And here are prebuilt feeds for the various levels of goodness that sit atop the main WWD feed (naturally, we hope you’ll still subscribe to the full feed!):
It’s a clever idea, and seemed to work well on the sites that I tested it with. The service is free, and they say they’re committed to remaining that way, with perhaps some for-pay advanced options in the future.
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Useful if filtering is the main objective, but it forces sort of a regression to the mean. You’ll see what’s popular with the masses, but not necessarily see items that will mean more to you than to others (would tend to filter out minority interests and viewpoints).
@logical Extremes: You should use aideRSS for some, not all, your feeds. The ones that cover a subject that you care deeply about should stay in their original form in your RSS reader. The rest can be piped through aideRSS. In my case the split is 60 aiderss/40 unfiltered.
try also putting blogsearch feeds in to find hottest coverage of any issue, topical thought leaders’ blog feeds to see what niche audiences are resposive to, tag feeds to prioritize toread or highlight from a shared tag – possibilities are endless.
just too bad the thing doesnt work very well. messed up technorati numbers, link to goog blog search feeds not results page and reprting sometimes as much as 12 hours behind. so we’re talking about feeds 12 hours behind, prioritized by messed up numbers. love the idea though. really hope they can fix it.
Thanks for the pointer – hadn’t heard of them before. It’s a neat idea that doesn’t address the real problem – deciding *personal* value. I think it’s much more important having an indicator of whether a feed is relevant to my use, not the general public’s.