Interesting: aideRSS

June 19th, 2008

aideRSS analyzes RSS feeds, and if pushed it a bit further, can be used to filter blog feeds to only serve up the “best stuff.”

At aideRSS, just enter the blog or RSS feed URL that you want to analyze. The site generates a table of all the feeds recent posts and its activity in terms of comments, Google Reader shares, Delicious saves, Diggs, and Tweets.

The far left column lists a new metric called “PostRank” which uses the stats mentioned above to generate a number from one to ten. You can click on the header of the PostRank column to sort by “PostRank”.

Where the service becomes interesting is the filtering: you can click on the headings listed Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts, and Top 20 to sort the table in different ways. The “Top 20″ view has a lot of appeal as it only shows the posts with the best conversations. Each of these views are output as RSS feeds which you can use as you like in other services.

Since I’m sensitive to information overload, my immediate thought was to populate Google Reader with “Best Posts” aideRSS feeds, filtering some of the more prolific blogs (TechCrunch, ValleyWag, io9 come to mind) that are often overwhelming.

Last but not least, widgets displaying these filtered feeds are also available for display on a blog.

The Good

• Service is easy to use and simple to understand.
• The filtered aideRSS feeds are openly available in RSS.

The Bad

• If you’re a blogger who cares about RSS feed subscription numbers as reported by FeedBurner, I imagine aideRSS may lower it, as a subscriber to an aideRSS-generated feed won’t hit your blog or FeedBurner URL. Personally, I could care less, but if aideRSS catches on, I’d expect a conversation about “stealing feeds” to hit the blogosphere. Update: aideRSS does report their subscription numbers back to FeedBurner; see comment below.
• The desire of bloggers to manage their own feeds means a WordPress plug-in or a new FeedBurner feature with similar functionality might have more appeal.
• The statistics used to generate PostRank could use more social services: Reddit, Technorati links, and FriendFeed come to mind.

Conclusion

On the surface, aideRSS is a blogger’s tool to analyze the popularity of their posts. But for blog readers, it could prove useful as a filter to find the best articles to read.