AideRSS, the marvelous service that filters items in any RSS feed for popularity with readers, has spun out its core technology PostRank as an Application Programing Interface (API) for integration into any other application. We love a good API here at RWW and hope to see some really interesting uses of this one.
PostRank looks at every item that comes through an RSS feed and scores it on a scale of 1 through 10 based on the number of comments it's received, inbound links, saves to del.cio.us, times it's been Tweeted and Dugg. The excitement comes in when the service delivers a filtered feed of just the 15% "most popular" items in that feed. It's a great way to pay casual attention to prolific feeds when you just want to see its own highlights.
Smaller blogs can still score high by getting an unusually high number of comments, etc. relative to the other posts in their feed.
Today the company is rolling out a slew of performance enhancements and new metrics including clickthroughs from its extensions, bookmarks in Ma.gnolia and mentions on microblogging service Pownce.
The company also rolled out a dedicated page for its very handy Google Reader extension - GReader users should check this one out.
We use AideRSS here at RWW every day and can't say enough about this simple but powerfully useful tool. We've written about it numerous times, including in the following particularly popular posts:
It's true, we love AideRSS. It's just so incredibly useful we can't get over it. We wish the algorithm for determining popularity was more transparent and we hope that today's performance enhancements make a big difference - but we love it none the less. We'd love to see the folks at AideRSS connect with the good people at Gnip, a social media pinging service plus that we wrote about here.
The prospect of AideRSS's PostRank being rolled into other applications around the web is an exciting one. In what contexts would you like to see just the most popular items in an RSS feed?
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
What about the stuff that comes from less prominent bloggers and websites. If everyone filtered this way wouldn't we miss a lot of great new content? It seems like a good idea, but it also may filter out some diamonds.
Posted by: Steve Olson | July 10, 2008 9:09 AM
Steve, that's a fair question but the way AideRSS works is this - it scores from 1 to 10 based only on the relative popularity in that feed. So looking for hotness in a small blog will show you its greatest hits relative to all its posts, even if those posts didn't get as much attention as a post from a big blog would have. I'll clarify that in the post.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
July 10, 2008 9:11 AM
Steve, Marshall nailed it. Thematic PostRank allows you to define the scope for the ranking. For example, you could rank the content from a collection of blogs, and if one of the bloggers has a much lower pickup, his/her rankings will be much lower.
However, you can also simply narrow down the scope to that blogger and rank his/her content only. In essence, because PostRank is a relative score.. it all depends on what you measure it against.
Posted by: Ilya Grigorik | July 10, 2008 10:41 AM