AideRSS ranks and sorts your RSS feeds
If you've accumulated hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds in your favorite reader you might be looking for a way to sort through them all. Of many solutions out there, Google Reader offers just a few ways to weed out lame feeds either by tracking inactivity or integrating tags for the sake or sorting. These tools are helpful, but far from a solution to save you from having to go through all your content to get to the good stuff.
Enter AidRSS, a ridiculously simple story sorter that uses PostRank, a rating system that measures how good a post is by factors like the number of user comments, traffic, and promotion on social news tools. All of this statistical analysis is applied to each story, giving it a score from 1 to 10.
The tool will let you sort which stories and feeds you want to view. You can rank from good to best, which will simply hide any posts that fall outside the threshold. You can also group together these stories based on the source, which will clump them together for easy perusal.
Adding AideRSS to Google Reader requires installing a plug-in. There are two flavors, on basic Firefox extension, and an add-on for the hacktacular Greasemonkey. Both have identical functionality.
One of the only downsides of relying on PostRank is that it simply doesn't work for every blog post. Some items found on friends' blogs or random RSS feeds that received low PostRank were very good, so simply ignoring them does not work. Mainstream content, on the other hand, gets at least a baseline rank.
Another thing to note is that it will noticeably slow down Google Reader performance if you've got PostRank turned on (note: there's a toggle switch). You can still read and open any feed quickly, but it will have to pull in the ratings each time you open a feed from the source list, which can take a while.
To see it in action check out the video below.
(Spotted on Delicious)
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
Couple small corrections -- with the Thematic PostRank functionality in Google Reader, the PostRank scores are based on comparing the performance of all the feeds you've selected and placed in a single folder, usually related to a specific topic -- Ruby development blogs, for example. The groupings and rankings don't necessarily relate to the feeds' source per se.
Also, while we're certainly aware that some folks have seen a slow-down with their Google Reader experience with our extension installed, we've seen no indication that it's a universal problem, or even a problem the majority of our users are seeing. In any case, yep, while we're working on it, there's an on/off toggle to give you the option of using it or not.
In response to user input from the launch of the Google Reader extension, we've made some fixes and enhanced some features. The full run-down is on our blog.
Thanks again, and looking forward to producing more cool stuff for you to report on!
Re: Slowdown--also good, although I just call 'em like I see them, which in this case slowed down my reader a tad. I might have more feeds than most users though. Not sure if that makes a whole lot of difference.
Cheers