Taming the RSS Beast

Check out Aid­eRSS — an excit­ing new tool to help man­age inform­a­tion over­load. It takes your exist­ing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by per­ceived qual­ity.
Won­der­ful paradigm shift­ing tech­no­lo­gies are sup­posed to stream­line our lives and allow us to rise to new cre­at­ive heights. The prom­ise of the paper­less office was to provide elec­tronic com­mu­nic­a­tions to free us from dis­trac­tions and the minu­tiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile tech­no­lo­gies were to unchain us from the phys­ical offices to let us quickly com­plete neces­sary tasks while sim­ul­tan­eously par­ti­cip­at­ing in those past­times that we want to. You could ‘seal the deal’ while watch­ing your son’s soc­cer game for example. But, for all the prom­ise, we now deal with more inform­a­tion and have to find ways to cope with greater engage­ment in more tasks than we have ever faced.
Humans are com­puls­ive anim­als and where there is time freed, we seem to fill it ever more com­pletely than before. We now struggle, more con­fused and over­loaded by inform­a­tion fed from a greater num­ber of sources. RSS feeds were to be the pan­acea for hav­ing to go to mul­tiple web­sites to find cur­rent inform­a­tion. They would con­sol­id­ate dis­par­ate sources in a single viewer and strip out extraneous com­pon­ents into a simple con­cise stream. Yet, those who have embraced RSS have had to develop tech­niques to quickly scan and sep­ar­ate the chaff from the wheat. RSS gen­er­ate a lot of noise and if you are using a reader to con­sol­id­ate your feeds, you know how addict­ive they can become. They can suck us into read­ing all the latest posts hop­ing for the find, but also in adding (oh so con­veni­ently) a feed from an author that posts a single intriguing art­icle. Thus far, most of the tech­niques that have developed have been manual. But there is hope on the hori­zon.
Ron Neu­mann poin­ted me to <a href=“http://www.aiderss.com” target=“_blank””>AideRSS the other day and hav­ing poked around the ser­vice a bit, col­our me impressed. The premise behind Aid­eRSS is that their pro­pri­et­ary PageR­ank engine grades post value rel­at­ive to pre­vi­ous posts on that blog. A numeric value is applied to all the posts from the feeds you wish to track and a ranked RSS feed is made avail­able to you. Thus you can sub­scribe to the single feed from Aid­eRSS (I so want to shorten this to ARSS — that can’t be good) and it will sub­scribe to all the feeds for you. You decide how many and of what qual­ity (good, bet­ter best) posts you want to read and Aid­eRSS com­plies.
The ser­vice is cur­rently free and des­pite apo­lo­gies for their slow speed, I found the ser­vice quite fact. The dash­board at the site is usable as an RSS reader itself and has thought­fully employed sparki­ines to visu­al­ize how the cur­rent post’s PageR­ank com­pares to his­tor­ical per­form­ance of the blog…thus return­ing a ‘blo­gtrend’.
The next step for such a ser­vice has to be in devel­op­ing greater per­son­al­iz­a­tion. There is a talk of a recom­mend­a­tion engine that may actu­ally push feeds. But, the PageR­ank value is cur­rently a per­ceived model value as opposed to a value weighted to your interests, needs or wants in par­tic­u­lar.
How­ever, this is one huge step in con­quer­ing what is becom­ing an ava­lanche of inform­a­tion, a hay­stack in which we may find that little nug­gets we seek, but increas­ingly weighted towards miss­ing out posts that we might truly value.