Feed Filters

I had previously discussed the Aide RSS Filtering Tool -

AideRSS looks at a variety of sources of information including comments, technorati, bloglines, icerocket and del.icio.us to determine what posts are generating the most interest.

I really like the concept of using different clues about what posts are generating interest to help sort through large numbers of posts. Certainly it's ability to find what are the posts generating the most interest on my own blog is helpful.

However, what I had hoped to find was a way for AideRSS to send me a feed of the top few posts across a large set of RSS feeds (like the 3,000 or so edublogs). Instead, AideRSS sends me a bunch of lower rated items along with the top items. It also does this on the site. So, I'm unsubscribing for now but will continue to use the widget.

At the same time, I would expect that Bloglines (the reader I use) and Google Reader will begin to incorporate this kind of capability soon. It would be fairly easy for them to provide a view of a set of RSS feeds sorted by "interestingness" based on a similar formula.

By the way, this post is also somewhat of an experiment. I subscribe to all links to my blog found through a couple of different sources. I was considering putting this information in a suggestion to Bloglines, but I thought a post would be better. However, I wonder how likely it is that someone from Bloglines will actually see this? Or someone from Google? Heck, I'm sure they both are already thinking about this functionality, but if this had actually been something that would have been useful, would they have seen it?

So, if you happen to be from Bloglines, make sure you comment. :)