A New, Better Approach to RSS

I spent some time over the weekend playing with a new RSS tool called AideRSS.

Created by a small team in Waterloo, Ont., AideRSS offers tools to analyze blogs and blog posts – thereby giving you the ability to quickly determine what blog posts are worth reading, which is a godsend for people struggling with too many RSS feeds and not enough time.

To set up AideRSS, you can manually enter a blog’s URL or import your OMPL file. AideRSS then analyzes the blog(s) to produce something called PostRank, which ranks each post based on “relevance and reaction”.

So how does PostRank work. According to AideRSS’s Ilya Grigorik, it’s based on the collection of a lot of meta-data from every post:

“Some of that data we show on the site itself: Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. Essentially, we’re interested in measuring the ‘social engagement’ of each post. To make this a little less hand-wavy, I think we’ll agree that a bookmark is nice but a comment involves more work, a trackback even more so, etc. – hence, engagement). Once we have all this data, we apply our ‘secret sauce’, which comes in a form of statistical analysis with respect to the author’s previous history/posts. PostRank is not a global score, it’s with respect to the blogger him/herself.”

After using AideRSS for a few days, there’s definitely something there. While it probably needs to become more user-friendly, AideRSS shows good progress in tackling a major problem/challenge for many people who rely on RSS feeds to consume information. I’d be very interested to see Robert Scoble’s take on AideRSS given he checks out hundreds of feeds a day.

More: For an extensive look at AideRSS, check out StartupNorth.