6 Ways to Filter Your RSS Feeds
RSS is easily one of the best things to happen to web publishing in the past 10 years. It allows users to easily keep track of news from multiple web sites because updates are delivered directly to them. But the problem many people face is that there are so many sources of information that we're trying to keep track of, we've become buried. Information overload is a real problem for many web users, and one way to cope with it is to filter your RSS feeds so you only see what you want to see.
There are many ways to filter news feeds from your favorite sources, including passively by relying on meme trackers like Techmeme or social news services such as Google Reader's shared items. We've also taken a look in the past at automatic filters such as Feedhub (our coverage) which learns from your behavior to suggest posts, or AideRSS (our coverage and here), which uses outside metrics to determine which items in an RSS feed are the "best." For the purpose of this post, however, we'll focus on services that let you filter by keyword.
Feed Rinse is a best of class RSS filtering application. It offers filtering by keyword, tag, author, title, etc. It supports regular expressions, has a built in profanity filter, and lets you upload your OPML file for easy importing of your RSS feeds (it can also export to OPML). And since we first covered it in April of 2006 it has gone completely free.
FilterMyRSS is a no-nonsense keyword filter that filters posts out by keyword. By that we mean that the service tracks posts for the keywords you want to filter and removes posts where it finds matches. It can filter by description, title, or category and offers some advanced XML options.
When we first reviewed 2or3things' Blastfeed in late 2006 it appeared to be shaping up as a good consumer filtering alternative to Feed Rinse. But since, the company has shifted gears and now offers Blastfeed as an enterprise filtering solution. Blastfeed's keyword filters can also be used to remix and republish blog feeds filtered for specific content -- for example, a fan site for a specific band could create a news feed from multiple general music sites that publishes only stories about that specific band.
Feed Sifter is an almost painfully simple RSS filter that filters in by keyword. Or, in other words, it watches for the keywords you enter and pushes stories to you that match those keywords. It can search for single keywords, or return stories that only match sets of keywords.
ZapTXT is a keyword filter (of the in variety) that returns results via email, instant messenger, or mobile phone. It is designed for people who prefer to consume RSS feeds via non-traditional methods (i.e., not via an RSS reader). ZapTXT also powers email, IM, and SMS alerts for sites like TheStreet.com.
For do-it-yourselfers, Yahoo! Pipes offers an easy way to create filtered RSS feeds. The RSS remixing application makes it easy to create simple filters. Just define your feed using the "Fetch Feed" module, connect it to a "Filter" module, which can filter either in or out by title, description, category, author, or date, and then connect it out to the Pipe Output. It isn't as comprehensive as Feed Rinse, but you do perhaps have more control. The example pipe below would filter our feed and return only posts that talk about "Facebook" in the title.
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I use netvibes personally. . .
FeedBurner provides no filtering? OpenBurner/OpenFeeder will. :-)
I still can't believe this functionality hasn't been integrated into (all) readers. We launched Feed Rinse in March of '06 and figured the need for external filters would be obsolete by the end of the year.
Thanks for including FR, btw.
Oh man... I'm rinsed...
So here I was, sitting at home listening to the kids being read a good night story when purveyor of all thing informational, ReadWriteWeb, suggested a foray with FeedRinse would leave me more time to engage with aforementioned story time and less inane read to... well read.
So, being the trusting sort of a soul I am I clicked on the link to RinseFeed, or FeedRinse, or Shampoo or something, a service that is designed to take in, sanitise, sort, slice and dice your feeds and serve them up on a platter (preferably hand blown and with a nice blue cheese on the side - but I digress)
Unfortunately after signing up to said service that statement of doom appeared - "The Free Service allows you to rinse five feeds"... Five feeds??? As of today I have 82 active feeds and more get added every week, Five feeds?? I mean how useful is that.
So I have to say no thanks to feed rinse and I'll keep on keeping on in my old, but effective speed reading way....
Check out my feed filtering list
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/rss-filter-and-re-mix#eight
I haven't kept up with this list, I bet there are heaps more services, and many of these may not be around anymore, it at least serves as a kind of history.
I agree that AideRSS is awesome in how it utilises the wisdom of crowds to deliver quality content, and also FeedRinse and Yahoo Pipes for detailed manipulation.
And don't look past Rasasa for RSS to SMS, IM, email.
Check out Bozpages for a cloud view of your spliced feed.
http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/bozpage/?gqt
- cloud view - http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/bozpage/opmlcloud.php?page=gqt
FeedCollectors is just awesome for presenting your feed, filter queries, search full text
I posted on this a while back
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/04/28/feed-collectors-reading-list-folksonomy-and-more/
My favourite is Feeddigest http://www.feeddigest.com/
It always works for me, you can both splice and filter, it has OPML, and it also has re-syndicating delivery in HTML (even customise the code), java, PDF, etc...other features are timezone, language, ordering
A unique feature is you can also do dedupe items that have the same URL or title. This is handy when you don't want to see posts about the exact same thing.
This idea would be handy for lifestreams, which comprises of blog feed, bookmark feed, photo feed, twitter feed, etc...
Often people may include their del.icio.us items in their blog feed, so their lifestream doubles up with the same content.
You have a maximum of 25 items in your new feed, you can also choose to just show live items, this means items only currently in the feeds you have spliced.
This is a good idea to keep everything ultra fresh.
My issue is just say you splice 4 feeds, and on a specific day feed number 1 creates about 5 posts which are all awesome, and then feed 2 creates about 10 posts, and feed 3 creates 10 posts, and feed 4 creates 5 posts..at this moment the 5 awesome posts from feed 1 have rolled off the feed.
Now if you are re-syndicating this as a box on a website, you want those 5 awesome posts from feed 1 to stay there a while, but over a couple of hours they can all roll of the page.
Problem is you have 25 posts showing for the rest of the day where none may be awesome.
So how do you increase air time for awesome posts.
I'm not sure how to do this, but I'd like to be able to give some feeds preference over others in air time, or perhaps even say "if feed 1 has posts about these keywords, then don't roll them off the page until 24 hours". Not sure what this means about items waiting in queue.
MySyndicaat also has the editing power of FeedDigest, but equally you can also make a destination page.
http://www.mysyndicaat.com/
A winning feature is tags also come through the feeds, so you can view content by tag, pity these tags don't have feeds of their own.
Another cool feature is tag clustering as a way to disambiguate tags eg. you tell the system when you see a post with the tag "atom", file it as "rss".
Another cool feature is "digests", basically you can watch your spliced feed stream and clip posts into your digest making a really good quality stream of handpicked items (which also has a feed I think).
Pity you can't subscribe to the orginial spliced feed and clip items to your digest from within your RSS Reader...maybe the firefox Google Reader plugin would help where it allows you to see the actual blog post rather than the RSS version (this also means you can leave a comment on the original post from your RSS Reader).
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9455
Here's an old post on MySyndicaat
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/03/24/mysyndicaat-tag-clustering-and-more/
Aaron, you nailed it -- it's disappointing that RSS filtering still isn't a part of the top RSS Readers, or Feedburner for that matter. Like commenter #2, when Feedburner first appeared I was sure it would soon introduce some kind of filtering or feed remix functionality. I kind of understand why they haven't -- Feedburner is all about publishers and so they need to keep them happy. And you can't easily go messing with publishers' feeds.
Still, I hope one of the big RSS Readers makes the leap soon.
Ben, you raised another great point -- why limit the users?
One last thing is that RSS filtering is *hard work* for users. It's extra work, and most people can't be bothered. What's more, most of these services create a *new* feed for you, which you then have to add to your RSS Reader. Another reason why this functionality should be integrated into RSS Readers.
You don't need to use a third-party online feed filtering service on the Mac. I recommend NetNewsWire, a free desktop feed reader that will filter all of your subscriptions simultaneously using "Smart Lists". You get a good choice of conditions built from combining choices in two drop-down menus; you can then add multiple conditions to each rule e.g. "Title : contains : geotag"
Bruce, you showed up my bias for browser-based Readers ;-) You're right, NetNewsWire does offer this type of feature for Mac users.
For a service to filter and customize news and opinion, check out Version II of VocalNation - it was just released a couple of days ago.
You can filter postings by region - here's Colombia.
Or you can slice by region and category, such as Environmental issues in China or Technology in California.
By news source, such as CNN or ReadWriteWeb.
You can even filter by political leaning.
What set's Vocal Nation apart though is that it's also a collabortive filtering system, where all the postings are ranked democratically. The result set will get even better over time as more people vote and more postings are added. Check it out, and vote if you dig it.
I don't think there is any need to provide filtering services which are seperate from the feed reading services themselves. Evolution of the primary feedreading services will eventually render these independent service obsolete.
FeedDemon already combines RSS reading with content filtering.
FeedDemon allows you to setup watches, which are effectively filters which operate on all of your RSS feeds. A watch contains a group of related keywords.
I used Yahoo Pipes for filtering RSS on Web 2.0 Filter
Hi, it's interesting that I have serious problems with most of the suggested sites.
1. Feed Rinse would have a good service if it has worked with non-English pages, but due to a nasty bug I have reported them approximately one and a half year earlier, that changes native (Hungarian) characters unreadable. This is a codepage/Unicode conversion-problem.
2. Blastfeed is an excellent filter I used, but in January of this year I got an e-mail from them that the service would be terminated by the end of February (thus now must not work), so i left them.
"In line with the above we shall discontinue the free service from February 15th 2008 on."
3. Yahoo Pipes is another excellent service I use, but it cannot process more than 6 feeds in one service), so it can be used to filter only small numbers of feeds. I can add more feeds to the "Fetch Feed" input, but Pipes doesn't put any item to the processed channel. Although one can get rid of this problem applying a text input field to the "Fetch Feed" box and run different services for each feed to filter.
So I merge RSS-feeds (I don't need real filtering too much) with Google Reader.
I use Mindity personally... http://www.mindity.com/WhatIs.aspx
Ben, Richard,
The feed filter limit is actually 500 rather than 5. Thanks for pointing out that error in the messaging on the front end.
I'm one of the geeks behind Alertle (http://www.alertle.com), a new web-based RSS reader, so my opinion might seem biased ;)
But frankly, I think the best way to deal with the RSS 'information overload' is to use a feed reader with the right layout and interface. The traditional 'email-like' interface (like Google Reader, Bloglines, etc do) and the 'boxes' interface (like Netvibes, etc do) are simply not right for RSS. No matter how much you rinse and filter and wash your feeds, but if the feed reader isn't hitting the sweet spot, then it doesn't really solve anything. So I suggest giving Alertle a try. It does the job for me.
At the same time, some of these feed filtering services are doing some rather cool/useful things, like sorting by keyword or identifying the top posts in a feed (based on how many comments, diggs it got,etc). However, I don't think they are viable enough as standalone services and HAVE to be an integral part of the feed readers. Its like the spellchecker can't be a separate program from the text-editing software ! Its one family which works like a unit. Anyways...you get the idea :) I'd be looking to make feed filtering an integral part of Alertle some day for sure.
Who cares about filtering by keyword?
I use AideRSS to filter high-traffic feeds that have more content than I want to read (like ReadWriteWeb and other high-volume blogs).
Works like a charm, but there's a delay while the crowd has a chance to read it and show its wisdom.
I've been building my own RSS Reader after having to much information. I didn't think filtering was the right way for me. I use the category and title elements of rss to build up tags for each article. Then by weighting the feed and tags I can produce a tag cloud view of my RSS feeds. So if something is tagged with IPhone, I can read all of them at once. I've been keeping a blog about my project at tubejumper.com
People have been using filters to cut time organizing and reading email and I don't see why RSS should be any different. I have been using pipes for a while now for a variety of uses. I recently did an article on my blog illustrating a practical example of how Pipes was used to aggregate feeds from job boards to get the most qualified results for freelance web design and contract work.
...and then I ask myself, 'Does the average guy in the street know or care about RSS?'.
Will he/she ever bother to utilise any of these fine services. I believe as long as we (the industry) talks about RSS in the public domain, the power and potential of it will be forever niched into geeks and early adopters.
In response to this, we have created, at Zebtab, a powerful service that uses RSS as the enabler but only talks to users in terms of content and benefit, with not an orange icon in sight. The fact that we are still talking about the need for additional filtering is a clue that RSS, in itself, is not the answer, it's part of the problem (of information overload).
For us, it really is about the old maxim, 'less is more' or, put another way, 'your favourite favourites'.
RSS is part of the solution, not the solution in itself.
Come play with what we are building at www.zebtab.com
RSSFilter is another option for feed filtering - http://www.feedforall.com/rssfilter.htm
It can be used in conjunction with other RSS PHP scripts to merge multiple feeds and filter the contents.
HTH
serendipiTwitterous demonstrates another use of feeds, in particular "feed annotation" (enhancement, or augmentation) streams.
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/serendipitwitterous
A twitter feed is run through a Yahoo pipe that analyses the content of each feed item and augments it with related content, e.g. from youtube, slideshare, flickr and the OER recommender
Posted by: psychemedia.myopenid.com
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March 8, 2008 12:17 PM
It is disappointing that you are putting Yahoo! Pipes in the same category as oher services mentioned. Pipes is not your run of the mill filtering application. It can filter standalone XML and CSV files, translate feeds, search feeds based on location and put it on a map, let you use standalone web services applications, change titles and filter descriptions and so many more things. Its an amazing intuitive product which lets u build mashups! And you are telling it isn't as comprehensive as Feed Rinse. Gimme a break. Try using it and then post!!
Feed filtering is definitely the best way of ensuring readers are getting the information they want without having to go looking for it.
It's a feature that Feedburner should try to implement to make itself more useful to users.
This made me think that stream/category/global keyword filtering would be a useful addition to Gregarius. Then I found a plugin that allows filtering a stream by a regular expression : http://plugins.gregarius.net/index.php?req=info&id=47 - that is a good start !
By the way, Gregarius is a PHP/Mysql RSS/RDF/ATOM feed aggregator licensed under the GPL.
Nice find.
I've mailed this to the RWW guys so hopefully it warrants a story in its own right - but we've recently launched a new service called FeedZero.com which offers another way to filter RSS feeds.
It uses Bayesian filtering to present you with a list of filtered feed items - all you need to do is subscribe to a bunch of feeds, mark which ones you like and don't like (similar to classifying items as spam or not spam in an email client) and it'll learn your preferences.
It has just gone into testing so any feedback would be appreciated - http://www.feedzero.com