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The rise of link sharing on Twitter has cut down on many peoples' use of RSS readers and social bookmarking services like Delicious. Now blog post ranking service PostRank is aiming to systematize that shift - and they've done a really good job.

Imagine a system for delivering only high-value information via Twitter. That's what PostRank has built with its new PostRank Twitter Newsroom. The system finds the most engaging blogs on various topics, then automatically pulls the most talked-about posts from those blogs and now delivers those links to you via Twitter.

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.

If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.

Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.

The Google Reader team just announced the addition of an important new feature to Google's popular feed reader: you can now comment on any item that your friends have shared with you. In order to keep track of these conversations, Google has now also introduced a 'comments view' that will only show an excerpt of the post, but which highlights the comments your friends have made.

The newspaper business is clearly not doing so well these days. Now, the MediaNews Group, which, among many others, owns the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News, and Oakland Tribune, is trying to revive its business by going back to an old idea that didn't work in the past and surely won't work in the future: individualized, printed newspapers that users can print out at home with a proprietary printer.

We have spent a great deal of time covering US President Barack Obama's Web presence, from the Democrat's social media strategies to whitehouse.gov. So when the Republicans in the US Congress released a new version of their site - complete with RSS feeds and an API - we felt it only appropriate to give the site a bi-partisan once over. And while the site has received an obvious facelift, it's the underlying functionality - and access to information - that drew our attention.