Fragmented Tech

I’m currently subscribed to around 70 RSS feeds, which can definitely get overwhelming. One tool that has helped fend off the information overload is AideRSS. This is a great service that filters out the less important or less popular stories from any blog feed. It has really changed a lot of my RSS feeds, especially for big, active sites.

AideRSS looks at a given RSS feed and ranks each of their posts. It looks at the amount of attention a post is getting and compares it to other posts from the same blog. Each post is assigned a number, known as PostRank. The PostRank is calculated by looking at comments on the post, if it was posted to Digg or del.icio.us and how many other blogs link to that post. AideRSS then gives you five options for new feeds: All posts, Good posts (any post that scored over a 3), Great posts (over 5), Best posts (over 6) and the Top 20.

AideRSS works best with larger sites where users are commenting and other blogs are linking to them. Smaller sites will just have a very low PostRank for each post and may be slightly skewed by a bunch of spam comments or other factors. The one downside of the service that I’ve found is that it delivery of new items can be a bit delayed. So if you check your RSS frequently expect to get AideRSS feeds in chunks rather than a slow trickle.

They also recently announced an AideRSS Firefox Extension that integrates with Google Reader (currently in private beta). The extension adds the PostRank score to each blog post as well as some of social statistics for each post. Check out their video for more:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJKA2o1tww]

I’d definitely recommend trying out AideRSS on some of your feeds. If you start using it (or some other filtering system) let me know what you think in the comments.

Like this post? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get more like it! I’ll be posting more of my favorite tools over the next couple weeks.