When David Weinberger talks about how effective the Internet has been at evolving sophisticated filters for processing all the stuff that’s on the Internet, this is what he means. AideRSS is a Godsend. It analyzes the activity around each item in an RSS feed — Technorati hits, comments, Del.icio.us links, traffic reports, etc. — and calculates a score for the item. It then creates four feeds from the original feed, each set to a higher activity threshold.
Example: So far today, BoingBoing has posted a liver-curdling 18 entries. I could cut that down to two entries by subscribing to the feed of what AideRSS has deemed to be BoingBoing’s “best” posts. (Today, I’d be reading the obit of the fellow who could dial a phone by whistling, and a post on this “John Hughes meets George Romero” graphic novel. Among other things, I’d miss cheap plastic toys, fugly sweatshirts, a clay iPhone, and politically-themed crafting projects. Think I’d live.) If I really only want to hear from BoingBoing every couple of days, I could go for just the hits.
For those of you overloading on RSS feeds, but hoping not to miss anything big, this is totally key.
3 comments
Great explanation of what AideRSS actually does. The marketing of services like this seems a bit too high level and mysterious. Nice practical breakdown.
this is awesome — and inevitable, I think. keeping up with RSS is becoming as much of a challenge as manually keeping up with all the things I want to read — a kind of tragedy of the age, I think. RSS was meant to syndicate content, and the fact that we need something to manage the syndicate (second-level meta) shows that there’s nothing very “really simple” about RSS anymore …
if ever we start to need AideAideRSS, we’ll be in dire straits then, I fear
P.S. No one is allowed to use AideRSS on Snarkmarket’s RSS feed. NO ONE.