Library clips

RSS remixing resources are a plenty (filtering by tag, keyword, etc)…and splicing many feeds into a new feed, and even a HTML page to see your results.

AideRSS is RSS filtering with a difference, for any given feed you enter, it will generate various filtered feeds, not based on the person manually filtering in/out a keyword, but on the social activity around the feed.

Basically enter a feed and it offers a selection of ways to view this feed: All Posts, Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts, Top 20.

This is just the start, each of these filtered views has a feed, you can choose to add any to your RSS Reader, or add one to the My Feeds section.
The My Feeds section is a river of news of all your filtered feeds, and it outputs a spliced feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS Reader…the FAQ illustrates this effectively.

The automatic filters are based on PostRank which determines the social activity of posts within a feed, by determining it’s number of comments, times it has been bookmarked, rated, linked to, etc…R/WW tells us PostRank is not absolute, it’s only relative to other posts in the same feed:

“It’s important to note that because PostRank is normalized for each blog, a PR8 post on Slashdot is vastly different than a PR8 post on Read/WriteWeb.”

Mashable suggests PostRank could be a feature or plugin to your RSS Reader…more from Mashable:

“…helps you to prioritize news feeds based on the amount of social activity around them. Using an algorithm called PostRank, which tracks the number of comments, Digg votes, del.icio.us bookmarks and more, it will process any feed you enter and spit out feeds of All Posts, Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts and the Top 20. The ranking is relative, not absolute: it doesn’t matter that your latest post has less activity than Engadget’s, but rather that your latest post has more activity compared to your previous posts.”

Rather than subscribe to a filtered feed, I would like at my whim, the choice to read one of my feeds as filtered…today you may choose to read “all posts” by a particular feed, whereas if you are away for a couple of days you may decide to just read the “great posts” and ignore the rest.
eg. today I will read all posts from mashable, if I have been on holidays for a week, I may open my RSS Reader and decide to just read “great posts” from mashable…this way you have choice based on your situation.

I noticed mashable also mentions this:

“Make it a portable standard of sorts, rank the posts and let me decide how much I want to read: on busy days, perhaps just the top posts; on days with more free time, all of them. Further down the line, I think we’ll also see increased personalization: rather than showing me the stuff that the world likes best, show me what my friends and similar people liked.”

Memetrackers and memetracker RSS readers can identify socially popular posts and place them on the top of your pile as well as the clustered posts around them, see feedeye and feedable.
In this way instead of subscribing to a filtered feed, the popular posts are automatically ranked in your RSS Reader to the top of the pile.

I kind of find Engagd similar as you can make different variations (filtered versions) of a feed, the unique bit is that it’s not based on how popular it is socially, but how popular it is personally.

How it works

- Enter a feed or OPML

- You get various filtered views with %…eg. your blog may currently have 12% Great posts

- Each filtered view has a feed, subscribe to it in your RSS Reader or add it to your My Feeds section

- You can sort a view by PostRank, date, etc…you can see conversation activity for each post, and a summary if you click on more.

- The header has general stats eg. 170 posts per month • 512 posts since Jun 27, 07 • Last update: 36 minutes ago…and also a blog trends sparkline

- My Feeds section has 3 views: Saved feeds (where you can change the filters and export an OPML file), Top Stories (river of news of all your filtered feeds), and Dashboard (both views in one screen)

- Grab a spliced feed of your river of news or a top stories widget, I use Spotplex for now (this is moreso based on clicks, than conversation)

- Each feed also has a profile page where you can get a summary of all the filtered feeds and a widget (just click on sharing & widgets on a feed page)

Will I use it?

Not sure, I like the idea of entering my Top 10 feeds and not filtering, but sorting the content by PostRank, then subscribing to this one feed.

As mentioned before I’d like this as a feature in my RSS Reader, I think if I didn’t open my RSS Reader for a month, for each feed I would consider just looking at Top 20 posts, or Top 20 posts as a river of news for my whole RSS Reader.
If I’m still hungry for more, I could do the same thing again, but as a Great Posts view (in this instance the posts I marked as read from the Top 20 view would not appear).

These options make your RSS Reader more versatile where you can tailor productivity to the situation you are in
eg. I’ve just come back from holidays and I’ve got a big work load, I don’t have much time to read feeds, so just gimme the Top 20 posts of each feed, and I will feel I’m in the know without having to waste too much time.

It’s also handy if you want to try before you buy, that is, run a new feed through aideRSS to filter posts in different ways, this may help you decide if you want to subscribe (which is a commitment these days).

Filtering by popularity is always hard for the individual eg. mashable posts a lot, and I get a lot of my content from this blog, but I have to scan the many daily posts where I may find a couple of gems. If I sorted this by PostRank, the posts I like from their many daily posts are not necessarily going to be the socially popular posts. Filtering would be even worse as all I would see are the popular posts, this is why Engagd is a very “engaging” alternative, as it’s personalised.

I like the idea of using it for my blog feed to see the social activity, if I don’t use it for my feed reading, at least I will use it as a blogging tool.

The idea of aideRSS would be handy for a blog home page, I’d love to be able to filter a new blog by Top 20 posts, Great Posts, Good Posts, etc…

Tops stories from my blog (based on social activity)

Filtered feed versions of my blog

Top stories from my blog via SpotPlex (based on clicks in the last 7 days)

Top stories from my blog via SpotPlex (based on total clicks)