November 28th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Over at Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders (who recently sent a schwack of traffic to this old post), I read Wood Tang’s interesting theory on reorganizing your folders in you RSS reader. It makes a lot of sense:
So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas.
He suggests categories like ‘Can’t Miss’, ‘Skip Them’ and so forth. I could combine this with feed filtering from AideRSS and consume more of my feeds more efficiently.
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July 26th, 2007, 1 Comment »
I got a beta invite to AideRSS, but it seems they’ve already launched. In any case, I found some time recently to check it out. First, here’s their pitch:
AideRSS is an intelligent assistant that saves time and keeps you on top of the latest news. We research every story and filter out the noise, allowing you to focus on what matters most.
At first I was skeptical–why do I need somebody else to filter the RSS feeds I’ve already selected and personalized? After playing with it though, I discovered a handy application. In theory, I regularly ‘read’ 170 RSS feeds. In practice, I often skip categories of feeds. AideRSS does a good job of distilling, say, my 25-odd technology feeds and presenting the top ten articles (this FAQ entry describes their approach to ranking).
Plus AideRSS spits out a feed of my top stories. So that’s an RSS feed of my filtered RSS feeds. Nifty.
Two quibbles at the moment: the first is that there’s no means of easily deleting feeds in bulk (or I couldn’t find it). I asked for that feature, because I only want to keep my second-tier (in terms of reading) feeds in their tool. The other thing comes from the Grammar Nazi who lives in my liver–their logo reads as ‘aideRSS’, but they use ‘AideRSS’ everywhere else.
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