Back in January Amit Agarwal wrote a post called "How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Online Life" in which he talked about managing enormous lists of RSS feeds. It's likely that your feed list doesn't top 1200 like Amit's, but even with just 20 or 30 feeds, the constant stream of news can get overwhelming. At the time, on my own blog, I advised people to simply read fewer feeds, but now a team from Ontario, Canada led by programmer Ilya Grigorik thinks they have a better solution: AideRSS.
AideRSS, which launches today, is a new type of RSS filtering service that uses a proprietary system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog. I first read about PostRank on Ilya's blog last December and remember being very intrigued and thinking, "There's a web service in this." Just over 6 months later, Ilya's idea is being born as AideRSS, which I have been playing around with for a little over a week.
6 and a half months ago when Ilya conceived of PostRank, he described it this way:
"I look at the number of comments, number of bookmarks the visitors made, and the number of trackbacks. I collect this information from the internet and then normalize each post against the average for the blog in question - if you always get 15 comments, then you getting 17 comments doesn’t affect the ranking as much as, say getting 15 comments when you usually get 2."
PostRank still works more or less the same way, but it now includes information from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines. PostRank ranks post from 1-10 (with 10 being the most important posts), and the idea is that the most talked about posts are likely the most important. The key to making PR work, however, is really the normalization. A PR10 post on Slashdot, for example, where 100 comments isn't out of the ordinary, will be different than a PR10 post on a smaller blog where 15 comments might be abnormal.
"Trying to define 'good' for every blog is impossible," Ilya told me, which is why PostRank is figured based on the average performance of each blog. "Otherwise, the 'A-list' will skew all the scores," says Ilya, who built AideRSS using Ruby (back end) and Rails (front end). The site utilizes Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service in order to keep the growing index of sites up to date.
I did notice one weakness in AideRSS rankings, which which was a result of the service relying on outside services. The specific example that I saw involved my rarely updated personal blog, which had one post defined as a PR10. The problem was that it seemed to have achieved that ranking because of a bunch of trackback spam that Technorati let slip through. In this case, Technorati's failing adversely affected AideRSS rankings. Hopefully the guys at AideRSS can figure out a way to apply their own spam and trackback filters to make sure posts are not ranked highly because of spam comments or bad links that slip by other services.
AideRSS couldn't be simpler to use. Enter the URL of a website, and the application automatically finds and analyzes the feed if it hasn't seen it before. Once that is completed, the service displays a page with that site's last 20 posts. The posts can be organized by date or PostRank. Clicking on the 'More' button shows a brief excerpt from the post, as well as information on the various PostRank elements. Clicking on the title of each post will direct you to the post itself.
Posts can be filtered into three categories: good, great, and bests posts. This is again normalized to each blog. For example, since July 2nd, 21% of Read/WriteWeb's posts have been deemed by AideRSS to be in the "best" category, each having a PR between 6.5 and 10. For Slashdot, however since July 5th only 3% have achieved "best" status, with the highest PR among them at 8. It's important to note that because PostRank is normalized for each blog, a PR8 post on Slashdot is vastly different than a PR8 post on Read/WriteWeb.
Users can subscribe to filtered feeds (either good, great, or best posts feeds) via RSS in their usual feed reader, or add filtered feeds to their 'My Feeds' page. The My Feeds dashboard shows a mashup feed that includes every filtered feed the you're tracking. You can subscribe to that mashup feed in your normal feed reader.
In addition to adding feeds by hand, users can also import an OMPL file into AideRSS. Or if you decide you want to bring your saved feeds to another RSS reader, you can export an OPML file as well.
AideRSS is free and intends to remain that way. Their FAQ promises that there will always be a free version of the service available. I asked Ilya what his plans for monetizing the service were, and though he said the main focus right now is building the free consumer service, he hinted at the possibility of publisher services. Ilya told me that as the index grows, there exists the potential for meaningful analysis of post and reader trends, patterns, habits, meme tracking, etc. These sort of services are the type of things that could potentially be offered on a for-pay basis to publishers, but Ilya stressed that that is not a focus for AideRSS at the moment.
The website does offer a couple of blogger-centric services, however. The "Sharing & widgets" page for every site indexed by AideRSS offers two services aimed at publishers: a syndication widget that provides RSS links to AideRSS-filtered feeds (good, great, and best) as well as a top posts widget that lists the top ranked posts over a given time period. Below is Read/WriteWeb's best posts over the past month according to AideRSS. These are the posts that elicited the largest response from our readers, and according to the AideRSS system are thus deemed the most likely to be our best.
Top Posts: Read/WriteWeb
When I first read about Ilya's idea for a PostRank system, I was impressed. The service he and his partners Francis Lau and Kevin Thomason have put together is equally impressive. AideRSS is a novel way to filter RSS feeds that I think could be truly useful. More importantly, though, I think the real value of this service will come in the future, when and if they develop publisher tools that allow bloggers to track reader behavior. AideRSS should be able to theoretically help bloggers find that holy grail of blogging: the key to posts that your readers consistently respond to. Give AideRSS a try and let us know in the comments what you think about the service.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: First Look: AideRSS Feed Filtering.
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Heute ist ein neuer Service mit Namen aideRSS an den Start gegangen, der dabei helfen kann, die Informationsflut einzudämmen, die in unseren RSS-Readern aufläuft (das Thema hatten wir ja neulich schon: «Wie man es schafft, Hunderte von Feeds zu lesen»... Read More
Back in January Amit Agarwal wrote a post called "How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Online Life" in which he talked about managing enormous lists of RSS feeds. Read More
Comments
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I totally agree with your conclusion : the best value in filter RSS would be a personal filter (based on YOUR behaviour) and not on external / collective items ! I'm interrested on what ? SEO ? Usability ? Google ? Emarketing ? Design ? Accessibility ?
They only give a sort of digg-filter, based on collective will/need and not MINE !
PS: sorry for my english, my mother tong is frensh speaker ;-)
Posted by: Robi | July 24, 2007 3:32 AMIt's a good way to monitor 'killer' content, aka your flagship content. This is an important concept for bloggers.
It's also a good way to monitor your competitors' blogs ;)
Very neat idea. Maybe they can add blog-specific metrics. For example, my best performing post is not equal to bad post here or on TechCrunch. Just a simple addition to keep things in perspective.
Pierre
Posted by: Pierre Far | July 24, 2007 4:05 AM@Robi: check out feeds 2.0 for personal rss filter (it is in closed beta though).
@josh: is Ilya a personal friend of yours?
Nothing wrong with that of course, although I believe you should disclose it, because I think your writing style screams that you are promoting a friend. That of course is just my humble opinion (about your writing style), no offence please.
Posted by: George T. | July 24, 2007 4:32 AMThat is a great idea... it's the sort of idea I wish I had come up with.
Posted by: Matt Jones | July 24, 2007 4:32 AM@George T.: No, Ilya is not a personal friend of mine. This week was the first week we have ever talked extensively. We've crossed paths once before via email, and I've read his blog before (well, clearly ;)), but other than that we don't know each other.
Edit: I should mention that Ilya is a nice guy, I just didn't know him except for a couple of emails before this week. ;)
Posted by: Josh Catone | July 24, 2007 9:22 AMNow *this* is what I subscribe to R/RW for. First new service I've seen in a while that isn't regurgitation of Dot-com 1.0 ideas with 2.0 designs. Great use of public APIs.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | July 24, 2007 10:30 AMIf you start reading your feeds at morning it will not have any statistics yet. In this case this service will useless...
Posted by: None | July 24, 2007 10:52 AM@None: I actually asked Ilya how AideRSS would handle a story that was dugg days after posting and suddenly got hot, but wasn't initially. This was his response:
Because I think the value of this service is really on the publisher end more than the consumer (i.e., tools to monitor trends on your blog), how long it takes for posts to catch on a get hot, and a progressive timeline of each post's PostRank would actually be another useful service for blog owners.
Posted by: Josh Catone | July 24, 2007 11:09 AMOopsie!
They clearly made "PostRank" to play off of Google's PageRank, but PageRank is not 'a ranking for pages' it is 'a ranking by a guy named (Larry) Page'.
... back to the trademark office fellas! :[ sry
Posted by: Sean | July 24, 2007 1:23 PMNice app. yes. I think more 'intelligent RSS' behavioural analysis should come as standard across more browsers.
Posted by: Andy Pipes | July 24, 2007 2:57 PMThis is a great product. These guys are really going after the problem of helping people cope with information overload.
I wonder how much better their algorithm is than Google's "auto-sort" in Google Reader?
Potential buyout/patent target for Google?
Posted by: Steve | July 24, 2007 5:47 PMRSS sucks to begin with.
Posted by: john | July 25, 2007 10:06 AMThe main problem that I see, without testing the product it self, that it only can be used for US / Canada Blogs. In Europe, for example, we do have our own services for digg, etc. which aren't included in the list of services that AideRSS is looking for. That's going to be a problem for the moment.
Posted by: Igor | July 26, 2007 2:36 AMI Think this is a great service. Being able to track the relevance of posts is very useful, specially when you subscribe to many feeds.
However, I don't want to move over my feeds to other RSS Reader. For me Google Reader is the best and with some greasemonkey scripts that I use it is a huge produtivivty boost and information management service.
Can i use aideRSS without abandonning Google Reader?
If not, then you should build aidRSS functionalities in a Firefox plugin or Greasemonkey script, to turn your service ubiquous.
But overall, I think this is a very revolutionary service and problably, if it gains traction, it will be an acquisition target for the Big Companies.
Posted by: Ricardo Proença | July 26, 2007 6:01 AMForgot to say but I also agree with 2 comments already made:
Pierre Far (2#)
"Maybe they can add blog-specific metrics. For example, my best performing post is not equal to bad post here or on TechCrunch. Just a simple addition to keep things in perspective."
Igor (13#)
"The main problem that I see, without testing the product it self, that it only can be used for US / Canada Blogs. In Europe, for example, we do have our own services for digg, etc. which aren't included in the list of services that AideRSS is looking for. That's going to be a problem for the moment."
Posted by: Ricardo Proença | July 26, 2007 7:23 AMFor more personalized RSS/blog/article reading, you may want to check out a site that I have built and which is currently in beta: http://blern.com
Posted by: Jim | July 28, 2007 6:02 PM@Igor: Great point. The metrics we currently use are skewed towards US/Canadian users, and we've received a lot of requests in the past couple of days to consider using other sources for European/Asian blogs. In short, it is definitely something we will look into and try to extend to appeal to a more global audience - as they say, you've got to take it one step at a time.
@Ricardo: Can i use aideRSS without abandonning Google Reader?
Indeed, not only can you do that, but we would encourage you to do so. AideRSS is not meant to be an RSS reader replacement, our core service is as a middleman to filter and deliver news into your favorite reader. In the future, we will try to make this much clearer to our users, and in fact, it's something we're working on already.
Posted by: Ilya Grigorik | July 29, 2007 3:00 PM