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!

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.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

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

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 plus Snacker

RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.

Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.

Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer

You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.

You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.

FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp

We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.

Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.

Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.

Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.

Facebook plus Dapper

The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.

One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.

Friends of RWW

We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.

Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.

MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.

Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.

Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.

Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.

What About You?

What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.

Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.

Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!

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?

Of course, we have to begin by sharing our own feeds with you. The ReadWriteWeb network has several different feeds you can subscribe to, including:

• ReadWriteWeb
• ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-Up
• ReadWriteTalk (RSS)
• ReadWriteTalk (Add to iTunes)
• Last100
• AltSearchEngines

Some of the RWW Network writers also maintain their own personal sites you can subscribe to:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick (Personal)
• Josh Catone (Tumblog)
• Sarah Perez (Personal)
• Corvida (Personal)
• Sean Ammirati (Personal)
• Alex Iskold (Personal)
• Steve O'Hear (ZDNet)

Or just grab a "Best Of" OPML file for all of these: (Download Here)

RSS/OPML Files We've Shared

Our primary OPML resources come from this January post called "What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008," where we put together OPML files for the biggest trends in 2008: Open Data, Recommendation, Semantic Web, Mobile, and Visualization. From the post "WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web," we provided readers with many ways to keep track of leaks and news, one of which was a Governement Watchdogs Site OPML file. When we wrote about "How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet," we provided a "Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs" RSS feed created with Yahoo Pipes. And yesterday, on the article about "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web," we rounded up some of the best Gen Y blogs into one OPML file.

Below you can get access to either the RSS or the OPML files for the feeds we've shared:

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit OPML Files (Save Each Link to Download File)

• RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit RSS Feeds (Subscribe - Copy & Paste to Your Reader)

• RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed

Government Watchdogs OPML (Download Here)

• Wikileaks
• Wikileaks "Best Of"
• Cryptome's Greatest Hits

Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs RSS (Subscribe Here)

• LaughingSquid
• We Make Money Not Art
• Wooster Collective
• EveryoneForever
• WebUrbanist

Gen Y Greatest Hits OPML (Download Here)

• Ypulse
• My Gen Y Life
• Twenty Set
• Our American Shelf Life
• Millennial Leaders
• Lisa's Generation Relations Blog
• Modite
• Life Before Noon
• Generation Y Voodoo
• Personal Branding Blog
• Newly Corporate
• The Marketing Student
• Young and Frugal
• Employee Evolution
• PR Interactive

You can preview these RWW feeds in the widget below:

Bonus Content!

In the past, Marshall had also put together five of his favorite OPML on his personal site.

International Free Speech News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• ACLU free speech press releases
• Article 19: Campaign for Global Free Expression
• Index on Censorship
• Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• Amnesty International news

Big Picture Eco News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• Popular recent items tagged "environment" in Del.icio.us
• Environmental News Network
• Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
• Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
• Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban 
• WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.

Non Profit/Net Squared (Download Here)

Feeds from non profit groups using Web 2.0 tools to share news about the non profit sector.

Contains:

• The 501c3 Cast, a great podcast about non profit work.
• Items tagged Net2 in Del.icio.us, a news wire promoted by Net Squared
• Net Squared Interviews, interviews of folks using Web 2.0 tools explicitly for social good.
• Net Squared Blog, group blog by staff and participants in the Net Squared community.
• Non Profit Online News, long one of the most respected sources on the subject.
• Today in Tech Soup, news from the non profit technology assistance group Tech Soup, parent of Net Squared.

Political Audio (Download Here)

Three of the most moving and informative news audio shows online.

Contains:

• Democracy Now!, a daily hour of powerful media.
• Free Speech Radio News, daily half hour from correspondents around the world.
• The Global Shortwave Report, weekly highlights from English language shortwave radio world wide - a paradigm shaker.

Vlogs - Video Blog (Download Here) 

Contains:

• Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth - Video, world traveling social justice multi media activist.
• Brave New Television
• Geek Entertainment TV, funny interviews with interesting people in the Web 2.0 world
• Vlog - Flux, awesome radical street videography

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.

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.

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.