ReadWriteWeb

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.

The RSS Aggregation niche has been very busy this week. Numerous changes and enhancements were recently made to RSS aggregator RSSmeme.

However, another service that was once exclusively for Google Reader users is expanding to give users a more accurate analysis of what's popular on the web. Today, ReadBurner announced a partnership with the personalized homepage service Netvibes.

Benjamin Golub has been busy. He runs the site RSSmeme, an RSS aggregator that displays the top Shared Items items from Google Reader users. For a brief time, RSSmeme was the only Google Reader aggregator in town after ReadBurner closed up shop. But not too much later, ReadBurner was purchased and relaunched (our coverage), putting the two sites in competition once again. However, it looks like Golub has no plans to slow down with RSSmeme's development. He has recently released an RSSmeme API, which allows for all kinds of new filtering options, a mobile web site, and much more.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side: this week we took a look at our readers' favorite web apps, we covered the social news space in depth (including posts on digg, Mixx and a new app called BlogRize), we brought you the latest news from Facebook, Adobe and YouTube. On the trends side: Bernard Lunn wrote a 'must read' 3-part series on the new Web, we analyzed Tim O'Reilly's recent call for 'big ideas' on the Web, we celebrated RSS Day, and we interviewed a top Microsoft exec about Live Mesh.

RSS development powerhouse Volodymyr Danylyuk emailed users of his nearly 3 year old AJAX feed reader NewsAlloy today to let them know that he's closing up shop. While offering to sell the property at a bargain basement price, Danylyuk told users of the once groundbreaking service that it was time to export their OPML files and go home.

NewsAlloy is a story of one plucky engineer coming up with something smart, widely praised by leading figures in the blogosphere and ultimately doomed when Google better executed on a similar vision.

There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

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.

On Tuesday, the RSS aggregator service, ReadBurner, relaunched (our coverage) and brought with it a new look and many new features that improved upon the previous version of the site. Today, there comes even more news from the service: a launch of a mobilized version of the ReadBurner web site.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we get piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email. You'll notice that only a tiny percentage of those pitches result in write-ups here. How can you increase your chances of getting written about here or on other tech blogs? In this post we'll discuss five ways that companies often try and fail to get our attention and one way that almost always works.

NewsGator is a company that develops RSS aggregators for individuals and businesses. It is the maker of the popular FeedDemon RSS Reader for Windows and NetNewsWire for Mac. Today, NewsGator has announced a new version of their RSS Reader, designed specifically for users of Microsoft Outlook.

The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.

ReadBurner was an RSS aggregator service which displayed the most popular URLs at any given time based on how many people had shared them through Google Reader's Shared Items. To much disappointment, the site shut its doors last month, when the site's owner Alex Marktl could no longer make time to work on it. However, shortly after ReadBuner closed, Adam Ostrow, of Mashable, along with Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd) and Thomas Connors acquired ReadBurner with plans to bring it back online. Today, ReadBurner is back and brings with it several new features, too.

ReadBurner was an RSS aggregator service which displayed the most popular URLs at any given time based on how many people had shared them through Google Reader's Shared Items. To much disappointment, the site shut its doors last month, when the site's owner Alex Marktl could no longer make time to work on it. However, shortly after ReadBuner closed, Adam Ostrow, of Mashable, along with Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd) and Thomas Connors acquired ReadBurner with plans to bring it back online. Today, ReadBurner is back and brings with it several new features, too.

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who's subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired.

I was feeling frustrated yesterday when switching from one feed reader to another on a new computer. Then I remembered how wonderful RSS really is - and I decided to write this post. I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.

FirstRain is a web research tool-suite that markets itself to buy-side professionals in hedge funds. It costs $10k per year per user and is today announcing a distribution deal with CapitalIQ, an upstart Bloomberg competitor. That price is less than a Bloomberg box, but it's still a substantial chunk of change. What kind of emerging research tools are available for financial players at that kind of price-point?

FirstRain offers features that many of us who do business on the web would love to have, wether we buy and sell financial abstractions or not. What's offered is qualitative analysis of search results through more intelligent filtering than is available in any other tool I know of. The feature set feels oddly within reach, too, if only we had a small army of algorithm developers at our disposal. Check out the screenshots below.

Techmeme is a great place to stay up-to-date with the current tech news in the blogosphere, showing the most popular and current news items of the day. The site also offers a Leaderboard section which features the current top 100 bloggers and news sources. However, Techmeme is often under fire from bloggers who feel that it doesn't deliver a diverse enough selection of blogs and voices. Whether that's actually true or not is up for debate, but in the meantime, we thought we would look at other ways to stay on top of the the latest news in tech, sans Techmeme.

Single page aggregator PopURLs may be a few years old, but this side project of Austrian entrepreneur Thomas Marban just keeps getting cooler. Now Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I've seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring - but the site is cool.

The general PopURLs service is remarkably feature rich. Users can hover over items for a preview of the feeds from a long list of social news and media sites. There's a mobile site and many other platforms, from the Wii to Facebook.

When they say Craigslist is simple, it really is remarkably simple. The company finally launched an official blog and it's every bit as functionally pared down as the rest of the site. Maybe even more so - there's no way to subscribe. What's a blog without subscription? A blog that gets read a lot less than it would be otherwise!

That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.

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.

Have you heard about Toluu yet? This new RSS-based service, currently in private beta, lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because Toluu is very much like the reincarnation of the once-popular site, ShareYourOPML (now defunct), which used to do the same thing. But Toluu not only revives that site's spirit, it does so it a much better fashion than ShareYourOPML ever did.