Managing information overload is not an easy task these days with all the blogs, feeds and other content options filling up my feed reader. How can a user better navigate to the items that might interest them the most? This is a tough problem to solve as every users is different. AideRSS is trying to solve this problem by helping to filter out the noise and deliver only the content the most popular content by sampling the wisdom of the crowds.
I first started thinking about the Canadian-based startup, AideRSS, while chatting with Marshall Kirkpatrick at a reception in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas last month.Since we were both speaking at Blog World Expo about RSS and both have analyzed the RSS space for TechCrunch among other media outlets we had a great little chat about RSS. I had not yet closely examined AideRSS and Marshall suggested I take a look at it. I had already looked at FeedHub, a similar product, so we discussed them both.
AideRSS is focused on trying to help save you time by bringing you ranked content feeds based on either a single feed or an entire reading list. AideRSS has created a metric called PostRank which gives a value to every feed item based on a set criteria. So basically, a user can enter a feed URL and AideRSS checks around the Web to learn about this feed, its statistics, and people’s reaction to it (which then creates a PostRank for each item in the feed). AideRSS creates a new feed which actually displays the PostRank of each item in the feed making it easy to see which items might be worth skipping over based on the opinions other readers.
In looking at a single feed, in this case the Somewhat Frank feed, you
can determine which posts were most well received by the readers in the
last few weeks (as shown in the screen-shot below).
As you can see the PostRank is higher on an item with more links to it and/or discussions brewing via a sampling of social news sites on the Web.
All-in-all, I was impressed with AideRSS as it makes it easy to see the online conversations swirling about a particular feed item. I will continue to use it in the coming months. I also will continue to use FeedHub because they use different approaches. FeedHub is looking at your own personal feed behavior to give you additional recommendations while AideRSS is looking to recommend items based on their popularity on the Web. I think there is room for both and it will be interesting to see which service I find myself turning to more habitually.
