blog

I just stumbled across aideRSS. It is a site which helps users find the best posts from a particular RSS feed by providing a “PostRank”.

Because blog posts are often their author’s random streams of consciousness, it is hard to wade through the many posts to find the few where an author was particularly clever. This is where aideRSS steps in. aideRSS helps you determine the signal to noise ratio of a particular feed.

They use an algorithm based on relevance, content, and people’s reaction to it. For instance, it shows how many times a particular post is referenced in digg, del.icio.us, or Bloglines (They should add Diigo to the list.

I think this will help me find the best posts from a particular feed and also, determine whether it is worth it to subscribe to the feed at all.

This is a great idea that I think will only get better. For instance, it would would be nice if user’s could rate posts. However those ratings should only be a portion of the formula, otherwise spammers and group-think could skew results. Also I think I would like to be able to subscribe to filtered feeds. The posts may need to be delayed a couple days, but that would not bother me, if I could get a better ratio of quality content.

Beyond that, they use sparklines in their UI, which you gotta love.

» This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under General, Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.