AideRSS - Filter Out The Most Important Stories In Google Reader

I spend a good deal of my working day living inside Google Reader. It is my research assistant, bringing me stories from multiple sources all over the web that I may want to follow up on later. But the continual problem with “multiple sources” is the increasing “noise”, the information overload and the increased likelihood that in among all those stories crowding into Google Reader is the one truly great story, the gem that is going to get trampled by the crowd. That is why AideRSS is becoming an interesting assistant to my assistant!

AideRSS is basically a ranking system that helps you to do one of two things :

1) helps you determine whether a blog feed is worth subscribing to in the first place

2) helps you filter out blog posts in Google Reader depending on popularity, statistics and reader reaction.

Let’s look at number one first. Let’s imagine for a moment that you have never seen Make Use Of before and you were contemplating subscribing. But you were not sure whether it was worth adding Make Use Of to your already overcrowded RSS reader. Well you can go to AideRSS and have the Make Use Of feed analysed.

Just enter “http://www.makeuseof.com” in the search engine, click “analyze” and a detailed report comes up. You will see a selection of posts along with the number of Diggs it received, the number of times it was saved to Delicious, and the number of comments on Make Use Of. But also the Postrank number.

The Postrank number is an AideRSS invention and it is a number showing the importance given to that post. AideRSS analyses the post, based on various statistics such as the Diggs, the comments, the stumbles, the reactions, the buzz, other stats, and then assigns it a postrank number. The higher the number the better. If it has a high number, then you should be paying attention to those posts because that is where the action is. If a post has a low postrank number, then head for a morgue if you’re looking for some action because you won’t find any around that post!

So right away, if you’re contemplating whether or not to subscribe to the feed, you can see how hot the posts are, what the reader reactions are like, if the posts are dugg a lot, saved a lot to Delicious….that then gives you a good idea if you want to be a part of that community.

But it’s the Google Reader Firefox extension that is the best part of all. You can now have all your RSS feeds in Google Reader constantly updated with AideRSS postranks. You can filter your posts with either “good”, “great” or “best” if you want to filter out all the crap and head straight to the top quality posts that everyone online is talking about.

This may not be to everyone’s tastes. You may not like a company dictating to you what is good, great or best. You may prefer to make that call for yourself. Indeed, I am not sure how long I will use this for. I am using it at the moment for testing and evaluation purposes but as for the long term, I can’t say.

Plus, at the moment it doesn’t work alongside the Firefox Greasemonkey extension so you need to switch off Greasemonkey if you want to use AideRSS (the developers say they are urgently working on a fix and in the meantime they are offering an AideRSS Greasemonkey script if you can’t live without Greasemonkey).

The positive side to AideRSS though is that if you have hundreds of RSS feeds and you want to get to the top stories, this is an extremely easy way to filter out all the dross and go straight to the top stuff. If you’re aiming to be productive in life, it doesn’t get much better than this.

The AideRSS Firefox extension for Google Reader is currently in closed beta but AideRSS has kindly offered 100 beta invitations for Make Use Of readers to try out the service. Just click here and enter your email address in the box on the page. A direct download link will then be emailed to you along with the link to the Greasemonkey script if you’d rather prefer that. But be fast because 100 invitations is all we have!

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Visit his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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