* If you are finding yourself with a news feed overload AideRSS is a service worth investigating
Too many feeds, too little time! I can’t take it any more! Back when RSS was just starting to get noticed, there were a handful of useful news feeds to watch. Today, the total number of news feeds is estimated at around 85 million, and even if only one in one hundred thousand was worth reading that would still give you 850 feeds.
Let’s say that you have a rather more rational 100 feeds that you care about. If each feed has only one article updated each day that’s still that’s around 500 articles to read per working week! That’s a lot of reading no matter how you cut it.
If you are finding yourself with a news feed overload there’s a service worth investigating: The recently launched AideRSS service.
AideRSS takes the news feeds you point it at (you can specify them individually or upload an OPML file) and determines a “PostRank” that ranks the individual posts in the feeds according to the amount of attention the blogsphere (e.g. Bloglines, Technorati, del.icio.us, and comments to the posting in the actual blog) pays those posts (Ah-ha! The meta-attention economy!). Ilya Grigorik, a founder of AideRSS, explains in his blog how PostRank works.
Using PostRank values for filtering AideRSS constructs an aggregated RSS feed for you so that you get, in theory, a more streamlined view of what should match your interests.
On the actual AideRSS site there’s a page for your account that shows you a list of your top ranked posts with the ratings of their associated conversations according to Bloglines, Technorati, and del.icio.us as well as a list of the top ranked feeds with a really cool “Blogtrends” graphic based on Sparklines.
Various commentators have pointed out that there’s a danger in missing out on the latest, greatest ideas because they won’t have high PostRank values until they have had a chance to “circulate.” Writing in the StartupNorth blog, Jevon MacDonald commented: “My solution is to put many of the less frequently updated and less interesting blogs in AideRSS while keeping a lot of my daily favorites in my regular RSS reader.”
Another interesting idea came from a posting by Nathan Gilliatt in The Net-Savvy Executive blog: “If AideRSS were to go one more step and add feeds for the analytics, it would be a must-have tool for publishers—at least until del.icio.us provides a domain search feature. Published stats from AideRSS would partially address the earlier analytics problem, too. If the service becomes popular, it opens the door to a new kind of audience segmentation (by selected filter).”
AideRSS also provides a widget for Web sites that displays the top-ranked entries in your feeds.
So, how good is AideRSS? Try it yourself and notice how they apologize for the delay in analyzing the feeds you point them at: Their servers are getting hammered! The need for a service such as this is undeniable and the potential for serving not only consumers but also publishing is enormous.
The AideRSS people say that they intend that the basic service should always be free with premium services planned for the future.
