ReadWriteWeb

PostRank today announced a new feature to its website called the Discovery Engine. This leverages the power of its existing automatic ranking algorithms to recommend new information sources to visitors. Along with this new tool comes a completely revamped web page layout that focuses more on the user experience on the site.

RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

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.

In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.

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.

Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.

Teaching people how to use new tools on the internet is hard. Learning through experience is the most effective method, but it's slow. More and more of us are finding ourselves teaching other people how to use new web apps and services - sometimes professionally.

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.

How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

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.

As you may have heard, we're big fans of RSS here at ReadWriteWeb. We've covered many RSS readers, aggregators, sites, and services in the past and have provided RSS tips in posts like "Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader" and "6 Ways to Filter Your RSS Feeds." We also like reading feeds and sharing some of our favorites with our readers. Over the past year or so, we've provided access to many RSS feeds and OPML files we thought our readers would enjoy. However, until now, those files have been spread out amongst our archived posts. Today, you can get access to all the RSS resources we've shared with you right here.

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking engine AideRSS to analyze the connection between popularity and timing. He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links.

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.

Newsgator Online, the company's web-based feed reader and until now a relatively weak product, rolled out a feature today that makes the service worth another look.

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.

Overwhelmed with all the content coming through your Google Reader? Want to skim just the top stories from any feed you're looking at? Canadian RSS filtering service AideRSS today launched a new Firefox plug-in that lays the company's unique "filter by popularity" features over the top of Google Reader. Limited beta invites are available below.

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 Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.