When I was going through my feeds today I discovered a new service called aideRSS and given my +300 subscriptions I’m always interested to find out better ways to manage these. It seemed like that is exactly what aideRSS is able to do so I checked it out immediately this morning. First thought: brilliant.
There are some feeds in my reader that definitely could be skimmed down to the most interesting posts, like the del.icio.us/popular feed (image above) for instance so I gave that a try. After uploading a feed you can select to see all posts or only the good post, great posts or best posts. This is based on the PostRank feature that is propriatory to aideRSS and unfortunately the help page about that is offline for the moment as I’m curious to find out more about how they calculate that.
You can upload your whole OPML into the service, you can subscribe to a filtered feed (like all best posts from a feed) in the integrated feedreader or in your own. There are sharing widgets etc etc. And as you can see in the screenshot above, you get immediate info from del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, … on the interaction for that post. This is something that I suggested to Technorati a few weeks ago so I obviously like that as well.
Best of all? It’s pretty amazingly fast (especially when they have a blog on record yet). And it’s there that I see the only problem for now as well, each time I did get an error it had something to do with uploading a feed that wasn’t in the system already. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon. And as said the PostRank information page gives an error as does the aideRSS blog for the moment.
Overall I think aideRSS still needs work but it offers a pretty good and fast solution with very good navigation so definitely worth a try. Sometimes it crashes when trying to add a new blog and I get the feeling there’s work to do on the PostRank score as well looking at some of the differences between blogs on that topic. I also think they have an opportunity to do some of the stuff we saw on http://share.opml.org. Anyway good stuff you guys, I would give that feedback on your forum as well if it weren’t down for the moment ;)
[Via Blogologie]
'Cross The Breeze 
Kris, with 300+ subscriptions, you don’t need extra software to manage your RSS feeds, you need a server of your own! My first reaction was: “how does he get his work done?”, but then it hit me: this is your work. :-)
I wouldn’t actually call it my work, I’ve just always been very addicted to news somehow. It doesn’t take that much of time to catch up on the feeds daily, but I don’t read them one by one either of course. Still the aideRSS comes in handy :)
Pascal suggested me the “Sort by auto” in Google Reader a few days ago, that should be doing somewhat the same (perhaps even better in case it takes your own reader behaviour into account). I tried it a few times, but I still have this feeling I’d better check every post (just to make sure I don’t miss anything).
Appears a promising tool, but quite error-prone. I’ve had half a dozen error messages in about a quarter of an hour.
The algorithm is a mixture of the things you see on the right: del.icio.us bookmarks, nr of diggs and comments, google blogsearch &technorati backlinks…
which means it’s not a good way to rank fresh postings that haven’t accumulated feedback yet.
It’s a good way to check the relative succes of your own postings in one glance:
http://www.aiderss.com/all/crossthebreeze.com/feed/
@ Hans: I agree completely – looks like it has potential, but get a lot of errors myself as well, I guess we’ll have to give ’em some credit now ;)
@ Pascal: It’s indeed not the best to rank fresh posts, although it does look at time as well in some way. And just like you point out (and like I wrote as well referencing the earlier Technorati post) there might be an opportunity to use this to find out about a blog’s interaction. And that interests me from my job’s point of view.
(Note, partially duplicate comment from Hans’ blog. Call me lazy :) )
Although I see and appreciate where they are coming from, I’m afraid there is an omission in the thinking here.
As Kris points out over on Hans’ blog, this can be an excellent tool to decide on outreach programs and other situations where the popularity of a blog is relevant. However, popularity does not equal relevance, particularly in a field still seeing so much development as blogging.
A lot of new business bloggers are coming to the field still, and the fact that at the beginning they don’t have a large readership yet doesn’t mean they might not have great content. Aside from the fact that I see an issue here with a new post coming out. Say you pick up my RSS feed the moment it is updated – my new post will not have been read or commented as I posted it 5 mins ago, and nobody will ever read or comment, as AideRSS thinks its irrelevant…
Let’s just say, I’m a little bit worried that this is another service that reinforces the dictatorship of the popular, such as Digg. And of course, running a blog that is built on the premise that some human mediation is necessary to find the best and most relevant posts, I feel threatened :)
P.S. I know it’s early days, but testing the service it manages to completely miss out on the most important and relevant posts on
@ Stefan: I think you make a very good point. I’ve been playing with the service a bit more (with an overload of errors while doing so) and I’m not sure yet how I will use it exactly. It’s definitely not good to rate recent posts and it only gives results from the moment it started tracking (June/July) so some of your best stuff might be ignored completely.
I think what I mainly like is the way they pull in all the other data on comments, linklove, … that is usefull to measure interaction on a blog. Not influence, authority, relevance, … just interaction. And as I mentioned before, I think it’s something Technorati should have added to their service long time ago. Imagine Technorati pulling in all this data and then allowing you to combine this every which way you want to calculate what you think authority should be. That would be useful for me :)
Kris, from that point of view it is indeed a nice tool, and would make a great addition to Technorati.
I’ve added it to my own tool-list for evaluating how my blogs are doing :)
This is aa great post