Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn't playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won't be able to use it yet. Update: We're hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of "it's in private Beta" users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.

Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there's all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs ("10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things"), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.

AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality - but it's not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.

The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.

The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.

ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.

Information Overload

The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.

I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.

A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com

Limitations of AideRSS

There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).

Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.

Reaching Out

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.

Luciani's conclusion: between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares. See the graphs below.

In the graphs below the factor measured is what AideRSS calls a PostRank of 6 or higher. AideRSS looks at all the items in an RSS feed and scores them (relative only to other items in the same feed) in terms of number of comments, number of Diggs, number of times saved to Del.icio.us and number of inbound links from blogs. The highest percentile of posts in a feed have PostRanks closest to 10.

These graphs then measure which times and days see the largest numbers of posts submitted that end up being more popular than other posts in the same feed. So the most wildly popular and discussed items among all popular items at Digg, etc. It's tracking the time that the post is submitted to the news site - not when it was necessarily posted on the blog. It's a touch obtuse and it would be nice to read a little more about the methodology employed - but the PostRank algorithm is relatively transparent and the conclusions are intuitive.

This is just one of many things we've written about using AideRSS for here at RWW. It's a simple and very powerful tool that I at least use every single day.

Note that of course people blog for more reasons than just popularity and popularity cannot be equated with popularity! If you're in a hurry it is one way to look for quality, though. :)

With no further ado, knock yourself out wrapping your mind around these graphs. I almost did; remember that times here are GMT and if you're on the West Coast of the US, I hope you just had a nice lunch and remember to subtract 7 hours from this 24 hour clock to figure out these times for yourself.

Thanks for the creative and valuable work, Jake!

For more RSS fun times, check out the other entries on the AideRSS blog.

One of our favorite filtering services, AideRSS, is now ranking by popularity the individual items in feeds you subscribe to. Newsgator users can now read the most commented on, linked-to, Dugg and saved in del.icio.us posts in either a single feed or across the bulk of their subscriptions.

Newsgator Online has long been slower, uglier and more awkward to use than the company's other consumer products like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. It's been much improved lately in all those matters and now offers personalized feed recommendations. Newsgator also publishes an APML file for each user's activity, though it's export only so far.

Limitations

The AideRSS processing is limited at launch to the 1000 most subscribed-to blogs in Newsgator. That means this is good for casual use, but one of the biggest benefits of AideRSS is its ability to process any RSS feed. I regularly use it to filter obscure blogs or blogsearch feeds, for example. You can imagine the processing power that would require though. Starting with the 1000 most popular feeds sounds like a great solution to me.

Right now it's only Newsgator Online where this integration is available - not, for example in NetNewsWire. Since the company's desktop products sync with its online and mobile readers - it would be great if users could read at home on the desktop readers (which are some of the best products on the market) and then read just AideRSS filtered highlights on the road by mobile.

We'll see where this goes, but for now I would recommend exporting your feeds out of whatever reader you currently use, importing them into a Newsgator Online account and giving the AideRSS view a try. It's pretty handy and OPML makes it very easy to try out.

If you're interested in RSS filtering for popularity, check out RSSMeme's new FriendFeed filter, too. It looks pretty hot.

See the screenshot below, articles truncated here but full feed display is also available. AideRSS ranking is displayed in the bottom right of each item.

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.

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:

• Want That Post to Go Popular? Here's the Best and Worst Times to Post It


• What's Next on the Web: A ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008


• How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet


• Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche


• Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond


• Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your Feed Reader


• Why Gen Y is Going to Change the Web


• Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again


• An Ode to RSS On RSS Appreciation Day


• Why Online "Noise" is Good for You

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?

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.

How Do You Use AideRSS

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 For Bloggers

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

Conclusion

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.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

Head on over to Jobwire to find out about other new hires at RedHat, MindTouch, Stack Overflow and more.

We're reporting on 10 to 15 new hires in tech and new media every day at Jobwire. From executives to engineers, if you've got a new job or your company has made a new hire - let us know!

So prescient was his vision of the future of publishing though that today he's married to the co-founder of Blogger.com and can be counted among the earliest pioneers in the present era of online bricolage - the art of assembling diverse found objects.

Not only are these types of sites widely read, they are also inspiring a cultural renaissance of bricolage on sites like Tumblr and FFFFound.

Great Sites to Find Fantastic Things

Note: If you are reading this story by RSS, you may not be able to see the dynamic list of recent popular stories from each source. You can click through to the live site to see them. Speaking of RSS, reader Víctor Hernández created a spliced feed of all the blogs below into one at this URL.

BoingBoing

BoingBoing is the biggest mover and shaker here. It's a group blog with an art and politics slant. It's a great place to discover "wonderful things" in large quantities. You probably already knew that, though, because you probably already read BoingBoing.

Waxy Links

Waxy Links is the link blog that rides beside Upcoming.org co-founder Andy Baio's blog Waxy.org. Baio has taken to doing investigative blogging on various topics on his main site, but his link blog is a widely loved river of weird. When your link blog is hot enough to have an ad from the uber-boutique ad network The Deck on it, then you know you're a monster.

Neatorama

Neatorama is a lot like BoingBoing, but a lot less high-brow and a little more fun. Regular games of "What Is It?" challenge readers to identify photographs of old and unusual objects. The whole site is almost a clearinghouse of weird and it's a much quicker read than BoingBoing. The long list of authors is lead by Biochemist Alex Santoso, who started the blog as a hobby in 2005.

Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is a great place to find cool art, projects and photography from San Francisco and elsewhere. It's the work of web-hosting company owner and aficionado of cool Scott Beale.

Beale's posts regularly hit the front page of Digg and his excellent photos are regularly ripped off without attribution by mainstream media outlets.

JoshSpear.com

JoshSpear.com is run by "one of the youngest brand strategists in the world," Josh Spear, and has a long list of regular contributors. Spear and crew regularly find some of the coolest art, music, craft, design and marketing projects on the web. In addition to speaking and writing around the world, Spear runs SpearCollective, an artist management collective.

Fresh Creation

FreshCreation is run by Dutch creative Martijn van Osch. The site collects oddly creative works from around the world and almost always includes a video for every post. FreshCreation was the inspiration for our recent post here on the future of interface design.

PicoCool

PicoCool says it "is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people." Lots of great finds from Etsy and other beautiful, small things. The site is run by web designer Emily Chang, whose company did the new design for RWW.

Swiss Miss

SwissMiss is a widely read design blog written by Swiss transplant to NY Tina Roth Eisenberg. Lots of physical objects here but not exclusively. Eisenberg's discoveries are regularly reblogged by other cool-hunting blogs.

NotCot

NotCot is a beautiful site that collects image-based links to projects around the web. The site was founded by UX designer Jean Aw and Web 2.0 loving Cognitive Scientist Danial Frysinger. The site's organization is remarkable as well. Entries are navigable by time, popularity or by random selection.

We Make Money Not Art

we make money not art is a phenomenon that simply must be seen to be believed. Run by an international trio of curators, the site's aesthetic is oddly fascinating. When the word "bricolage" comes up, we make money not art is the first blog that many people think of.

Those are some of our favorites. What are yours?

We'd love to know.

Though you, elite readers, might consider getting excited about apps that are a year or two old to be painfully behind the times, the fact is that there is huge demand for training in use and application of web apps old and new.

Yuuguu

You can show people how to go through multi-step processes by sharing your desktop in a tab of their browser with Yuuguu. It's free, no downloads required, get sharing in seconds. Old versions of the software can be a bit buggy but the newest version has worked great for me.

There's absolutely nothing like getting to watch someone else work on their own desktop - it's a magical learning experience for people. I use it while talking to people on the phone, after IMing them the login and PIN to see my screen. I haven't tried recording the sessions yet, but that could be really useful too.

ViewMyPC will release a version of its screensharing app that lets viewers watch from inside their browsers as well, later this month.

Multi-platform IM Client

Multi-platform IM services let you IM with anyone almost anywhere, without worrying what IM network they are on. Just sign up for an account on AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, give your client the login info for each account and you'll be set for good. Mac users can check out Adium (pictured, but souped up), Windows users can try out Trillian or Digsby and anyone can use Meebo on the web.

If you're going to work with a wide variety of people online, you should be able to easily IM with them no matter what service they use.

IM during phone calls or even in person is the fastest way to share URLs, it's a great way to take shared notes and, as consultant to international Communities of Practice consultant John Smith says, it's a great way to clarify communication between people who don't speak the same languages natively.

Jing

Jing is the fastest, easiest way to record a short screencast demonstrating how to do something online. It's not particularly robust but for a quick tutorial to send to a client, you'll probably like it a lot.

The ability to watch again and again makes screencasting a particularly useful tool for consultants to offer their clients. If you're teaching any tangible skills, as opposed to just marketing fluff (or even genuinely useful marketing strategy!) then making screencasts all day long could prove very useful.

Annotated Screenshots with Screensteps or Skitch

ScreenSteps was the app we used to make this post in a jiffy, Skitch is another app we're totally in love with. Both are for Mac only - can anyone recommend a good PC equivalent? Update - we were wrong ScreenSteps has a Windows version after all!

The idea is that both make it really easy to grab screenshots, annotate them and then upload them to the web. For many clients, a screenshare or a screencast will still move too fast and it's really nice to be able to read text explaining how to do things at any time.

AideRSS: Filter RSS Feeds for Popularity

We write about AideRSS here all the time. Consulting clients love it, though. Tell them you can give them a feed, or run a feed through email for them, that delivers just the most popular items from any news source and they will adore you. Plug in any feed and it will score items by number of comments, inbound links, saves in delicious.com etc.

You can do this with almost anything. In the above screenshot, we've performed a Google Blogsearch for posts that link to a company's website, then changed the RSS URL to output 50 items instead of 10 (the default in the URL), then run that feed through AideRSS and grabbed the "best" feed. The goal here was to identify bloggers who had written about the company and gotten a big reaction from their readers. This is a good way to try and find a blogger for a company to hire if it's looking for one, among other things.

Those Are Our Favorites, What Are Yours?

Everyone's probably got a different list of "must-haves" but apps vary in terms of performance and functionality. If we're missing anything here, please let us know. What's more fun than learning about new ways to most effectively teach other people about all the exciting things going online these days?

Photo: Little Birdies, by Flickr user IanMatthewSoper

A project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress is a site that anyone even remotely interested in politics should see.

OpenCongress makes it easy to track particular bills, topics and congresspeople by RSS, a tracking page or an embeddable widget (see below, for example). A personal account can be created easily with OpenID, there's a perfect amount of AJAX making the site a joy to navigate and all kinds of outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

The widget above, about a particular bill in congress, is just one of many widgets you can choose from.

I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but within five minutes I built and subscribed to an RSS feed displaying the most recent votes of congresspeople from my area, news stories and blog posts about them and news about a few bills of particular interest to me.

I voted in favor of one bill myself and left a comment on the site about it. There were already a couple of other comments on the same bill and though most of them were worthless - I could hide those ones by turning up the rating criteria on a slider!

This is a really well put-together site that makes me want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling.

continued below

Dream Features

What more could OpenCongress offer? There's so much there it's impossible not to ask for more - it really feels like the people behind the site might deliver it! I'd love to see live embedded video of discussions about bills of interest to me and IM alerts when those discussions are about to happen.

Right now the site uses Technorati to bring in blog posts about any bill you're looking at and then users click back to the site to rate the posts they've read. It would be nice to see some AideRSS integration so that we could subscribe to just the most commented on and linked-to posts in that feed.

Finally, I'd like to be able to configure what gets delivered in the feed I subscribe to; an option to opt-out of certain information sources like news stories would probably work best.

More fun with Congress

See also this cute little widget the Sunlight Foundation launched yesterday, displaying the most used word of the day on the floor of congress. Very interesting! A tag cloud is in the works and at that point it will prove of more actual use. Congress - it's not just for stuffy people any more!

OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.

Asian Tech

I just spent last week visiting startups in Japan (more on that later) and found a strong desire to connect with the outside world. Language was the number one barrier, followed closely by a concern that people in the US and Europe were inaccessible to the smallest startups in Japan.

There's a strong mutual interest in connecting Asian tech and the rest of the world, though. As a writer, for example, I feel like my writing is incomplete if I don't incorporate some knowledge about how startups in Japan are tackling the problems I'm writing about that US and European companies are engaging with. In one meeting in Tokyo last week, I met government representatives from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry who were working on open standards for geo-location services. How cool is that? I had no idea that work like that, so grounded in the same kinds of open standards conversations we're having here, was going on there.

OpenWeb Asia

Enter OpenWeb Asia, where English-limited readers around the world can learn about what's going on in Asia. I've imported the 15 blog OPML file into my feed reader and encourage you to do the same. (If you've never imported an OPML file into Google Reader, for example, save the file linked to on OpenWeb Asia to your desktop, then go to "settings" in G Reader, then to the Import option, then upload the file and you'll be subscribed to all 15 blogs at once.)

One addition that I think would be nice would be filtered feeds for the 15 blogs on the page, using AideRSS, so that casual readers could catch just the most popular stories from the OpenWeb Asia blogs.

We can, however, set up a Google Custom Search Engine easily - see below. I'll be using this whenever I can to check and see who's doing what in the Asian tech scene. Feel free to do the same yourself.

I hope that OpenWeb Asia succeeds in building bridges from the Asian tech communities out into the rest of the world.

This work flow uses the following services, linked to here, demonstrated visually and described in text below: Del.icio.us, AideRSS, Yahoo! Pipes and Feedburner. There are probably many different ways to do the same thing, but this one comes with a slide show.

Steps involved

Source discovery

I started with two blogs that best exemplified what kind of content I'm looking for- BoingBoing and Neatorama. Not really "cool hunting" I think of them more as "weird hunting" blogs.

In order to discover more top sources similar to those two, I went to Del.icio.us Popular and clicked on the pink "how many people have tagged this URL" for any random URL. There you'll find a little box you can enter another URL into, like BoingBoing.

Once you do that, the tag cloud in the top right of the page will show you some of the most common tags used by other people to describe that URL. The larger the tag, the more common it is. You might want to refresh this page once or twice to see if things change, the limitations of our access to the Del.icio.us database is just one of many things that make this more an art than a science.

I did this for both BoingBoing and Neatorama and found that both are often tagged Blog and Culture. I then went to http://del.icio.us/tag/blog+culture to see what other URLs have recently been tagged both blog and culture. It would be great if Del.icio.us offered a most popular page for multiple tags like it does for single tags, but it does not.

I scanned down several pages of these results, in this case looking for URLs that had been tagged more than 500 times. Other niches may require a different threshold. I clicked through those popular URLs and looked to see if they were what I wanted. It took a little time to find just the right ones in this case, but this proccess did expose me to a whole lot of popular sites that I had never seen before.

In the end, I decided on including the following sites, for now: LaughingSquid, We Make Money Not Art, Wooster Collective, EveryoneForever and WebUrbanist. Those were the blogs I found that posted weird, interesting stuff and had at least some comments left on recent items. Comments are in important indicator of how popular a particular item is, though that criteria has its limitations as well.

Please feel free to recommend more top weird hunting blogs below in comments!

Cutting way down on the already fast-flowing river of weirdness

Once I had my list of seven top weird hunting blogs, I ran the feed for each one through the parsing service AideRSS. That service looks at every item in a feed and scores it (relative only to other items in the same feed) in terms of the number of comments an item got, the number of times it's been saved in Del.icio.us, Dugg in Digg and blogged about on another blog via blogsearch.

Those are explicit attention gestures that help show us quickly which items were "best" or at least most popular in a given feed. If you've got the time to read every item in a feed in order to determine what's best through methods better than looking at popularity, then you are a wonderful person. Please tag the best items in Del.icio.us so the rest of us can tell quickly which ones they are.

AideRSS will offer you an RSS feed of just the most popular items in any given feed, a "best of" for a particular blog if you will.

One feed, please!

Next, let's take all of the "best of" feeds for our seven selected weird hunting blogs and splice them together using Yahoo! Pipes. I was scared of Yahoo! Pipes, I must admit, until I read this excellent series of posts on how to use it by my old friend Justin Kistner.

For the purpose of splicing RSS feeds together in Pipes, all you need to know to get started is this:
1. Select "Sources", then "Fetch Feed" to add your RSS feeds one at a time.
2. Select "Operator", then "Union" to insert the command to splice them all together.
3. Drag and drop connections between all the little dots, down to "Union" and then Run That Pipe! Select output via "other" and RSS and you've got your spliced feed.

(I did go back in and add the command "sort by pub date" just to be safe.)

Finally, before you share that funky looking feed URL with anyone - I suggest you run it through Google's Feedburner. That way you can get a pretty URL, you can keep track of how many people you share it with actually subscribe, you can offer email subscription (see below) and if you need to ditch Pipes or make any other drastic changes later, you can just switch out the source RSS URL to Feedburner and subscribers will never know the difference.

Time to relax and weird out

That's it, now you've got an awesome feed of nothing but the most popular items from seven of the top blogs in the weird hunting niche. Those authors do a whole lot of parsing for us, but they also produce a whole lot of content. This methodology helps you systematically discover the top blogs in any niche and get a feed of just the most popular items published by those top blogs. I don't know about you, but I feel weirder already.

If you prefer getting your feeds by email (pretty weird, but whatever!) feel free to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Best of Weird Hunting Blogs feed using the form below.

photo CC via Flickr user Marxchivist. thanks for using Creative Commons!

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers every to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's huge amounts of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There's also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URl much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heart broken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category, the search results page is really random looking. Good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled just with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blogsearch on the web, it uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded some times and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't reley on it alone. Ask blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URL much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category. The search results page is really random-looking; good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled only with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech-focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, Diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche-specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blog search on the web. It uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche-specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely on it alone. Ask Blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.