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 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.
