When I wrote about AideRSS for the first time about a year ago the company was only a couple of months old. Their slogan said best what it was they tried to do (and succeeded in quite well): Read what matters. AideRSS was built as a service that would help you overcome the struggle keeping up with your RSS feeds. Ideally you would upload your OPML (or add feeds manually) and you could then based on a few metrics skim feeds to only the most popular posts. On top of that it would allow you to create a new feed of that… basically mashing up feeds to make them more readable. I loved it instantaneously (as did Marshall Kirkpatrick apparently).
Not long before that post on AideRSS I had written about the lack of innovation at Technorati and where they were missing some opportunities. Today Technorati has made itself irrelevant: there are way better blogsearch engines out there (like Google’s) and their so-called Authority metric is ridiculous. Anyway – back to the point – the opportunities I called out for Technorati are still there and when I saw AideRSS for the first time I considered they could be the ones to deliver upon these opportunities. Interestingly enough, it looks more and more like it that they will. AideRSS isn’t just that ‘read what matters’ service anymore, it has grown into an engagement tracking service, measuring storytelling ROI as they call it. And that’s a great evolution. They’ve even gone beyond keeping their ranking method as they released a new site dedicated to that ‘Postrank’ and also developed a Google Reader extension for Firefox which I’ve been using for a short while now.
Hopefully they don’t stop there. When I look at the stats for my own feed, I can only notice that not all metrics are correct: too many comments counted, not enough delicious bookmarks counted, … so some finetuning is still in place. But it remains an overall solid service. And I’m pretty sure Melanie will pick up on this as well ;)
Finally I believe they should give access to the full metrics AideRSS gathers for each blog (delicious, comments, …) and not only the Postrank itself. Imagine that you want to build your own bloglist with the top ‘x’ blogs in category ‘y’ but unlike Mack Collier or Peter Kim you don’t want to look up all this data manually to collect in XLS etc etc to make your weekly or monthly list. What if I could enter all the blogs I want to track against each other in AideRSS where they let you choose which metrics you want to track them with (only Technorati? or maybe subscribers as well?…) and have AideRSS build my list automatically based on the weight I defined for each metric? You define how often the list needs to be re-calculated. You create a widget for your and participating blogs. You create a weekly/monthly autoposting rhythm to your blog etc etc… Wouldn’t that be a compelling offer? And of course AideRSS can take the learnings for what happens in the backoffice because all of that.
'Cross The Breeze 
Hi,
We’ve a solution that does “almost” what you decribed as your whatif. So we share the same objectuve !
Currently not as automated yet as you describe it but on the other end workgroup ready . As an example we’re monitoring, ranking and engaging with 700+ blogs on social media (including yours :-) and we do this as a team. We have our special tools to find blogs that are relevant for a specific domain.
We also automatically syndicate the feeds of the blogs we comment on or post we find interesting. (on our blog – yes it’s a standard wordpress one so not so nice :-( ).
I would like to thank you for the description you gave. This helps, if you’ve time, I’d be very pleased to get additional feedback !
Now that looks cool. I like it. Thanks for the tip Kris.
Hi Kris,
Thanks for the coverage!
It’s been great hashing out ideas with you, and I look forward to more of it in the future. We’re at a really exciting point where we’re doing a lot of work and thinking on “what next?”, so these conversations are precisely what we need and want to have in as many places as possible.
The need for customized slicing and dicing of metrics is certainly one we’re seeing as a consistent pain point. The real challenge will be determining how to address it, since the need is coming from so many disparate sources and corporate cultures.
Exciting times!
Oh, forgot to mention — quirks like comment counts and stuff we are definitely aware of and working on. Fortunately, being web-based, iterations are relatively easy for us. :)
@dominic: Thanks for sharing. I’ll go check it out.
@Melanie: Exciting times indeed and I’m pretty sure you’re heading in the right direction so will keep following that. Thanks for fixing the Mustang blog feed by the way ;)