PostRank

When I first started reading RSS Reset: Dump Your Feeds for a Month I focused on the “dump” aspect and my reaction was: “Say it ain’t so!”

There are a lot of us out there who, day in and day out, process vast amounts of information, either out of personal interest or professional necessity (or both).

It’s a not uncommon reality that life will interfere with the quality time we get with our RSS feeds. And, of course, the information stream doesn’t let up as we’re trying to catch up, and so eventually we’re forced to give up.

Result: a declaration of RSS bankruptcy. Or, more extremely, we start deleting feeds wholesale. Declaring “bankruptcy” means marking all feeds, or sometimes just high-volume feeds, as read without actually reading them. This is a tragic last resort, however, and not something to just experiment with willy-nilly — hence my panicked reaction.

To maintain our sanity as information consumers, there are four truths that we have to accept:

1. We can’t track everything. (Not even Robert Scoble can.)
2. Not everything is interesting or relevant. (Plus, memory storage within the human brain is at a much higher premium than it is for data online.)
3. We WILL miss something, some time. (But the big/relevant/newsworthy stuff will get reported by so many people and outlets that it will be pretty much impossible to miss it.)
4. Knowing what’s going on out there is important, but having a life is just as important. (And in the Google Era, the required investment to find/learn something is pretty low.)

At the same time, we fall prey to several bad habits, which, over time, lower the value we get from our RSS reading:

1. We don’t vet very well. (We’ll subscribe to a feed based on one interesting blog post, which could be a relevance fluke.)
2. We don’t read critically. (Sometimes we’ll scan through every item in a feed just because it’s there, wasting time to determine that relevance is low.)
3. We rarely do any gardening. (We don’t take the time to prune out dead feeds, uproot feeds with information we don’t care about and never read, or fertilize our minds by adjusting subscriptions to feeds targeted more accurately to our interests, like PostRank-filtered feeds or topic-specific feeds.)

No wonder we end up declaring whole or partial RSS bankruptcy.

That said, I think an occasional reset is a good idea. And that’s what the ReadWriteWeb folks are actually advocating with RSS Reset Month. Stop mindlessly scanning, clear out the clutter, and start reading smart. Let technology do the heavy lifting. Savour and retain what you read because it really engages you.

The month-long time frame provides time to adjust to reading differently, tweak what works on an individual level, and realize that – hey! – there’s a lot of stuff we’ve been following that we don’t actually miss.

Plus, using PostRank filtering fits particularly nicely with their #4 rule for RSS Reset Month: Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme, FriendFeed Friends, or TechMeme.

Of course, re. rule #1 our Google Reader extension is a great way to help you analyze buzz, especially if you make tips like these work for you.

Additionally, the BlogTrends spark line (that small graph that appears at the top of a feed’s analysis) is a handy at-a-glance way to judge a site’s quality over time. And the presence of our widget on sites, displaying display top posts, allows us to judge relevance before subscribing.

Making smart use of available tools to help maximize our information management quality time can negate the need for RSS Reset Month, or — say it ain’t so — RSS bankruptcy.

trawlr is a web-based RSS aggregator that offers a tonne of features, and, best of all, has PostRank built in! You can use trawlr as an RSS reader to manage your existing feeds; it offers OPML importing and plenty of subscription management options. You can also create a lifestream, bringing many of your online activities — del.icio.us, flickr, last.fm, etc. — together in one place.

trawlr is also a great discovery engine. Browse all feeds that users have added. Explore topics using the tags that users have added to their feeds. Use the trawlr spy to see the most recently added or favourite-marked items.

The interface and functionality are clean and simple, and really streamline information management. Use the built-in PostRank filtering to tweak your feeds or feeds others have submitted for relevance, from “all” to “best”. View the rankings of recent items in a feed you’ve subscribed to and get an idea of the relevance of a site’s material. Create customized RSS feeds of your favourites.

trawlr works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and, of course, offers an iPhone-optimized version for info management on the go. A simply fantastic Rails-powered, one-man effort. Great work, Ben!

Catching up on a backlog of podcasts over the weekend, I stumbled across an awesome conversation between Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, and Will Harris on the subject of RSS.

Dave Winer, a pioneer and a huge evangelist of RSS amongst many other things, gave a really nice and simple way to explain RSS to the layman: “The best way I’ve found to explain RSS to people is to say that it’s automated web-surfing… If you have a pattern to your browsing, then you can teach your computer how to do that - that’s what RSS does”.

But it only gets more interesting from there on as Will and Leo discuss the ‘ultimate RSS reader application’ and AideRSS comes out on top of the pile. You can listen to the abridged version in WMA format, or listen to the original podcast on TWiT website (AideRSS discussion ~38 minutes in).

Tris Hussey of Maple Leaf 2.0 put together a comprehensive list of Canadian feeds and shared the OPML. Tris monitors more than 725 feeds — waaaay too many for your average person.

I decided to put together a Best of Canadian Feeds using the OPML kindly shared by Tris and by running each feed through our “Best” filter. You can subscribe in your reader of choice by grabbing the rss.

Enjoy.

So while it might look like all we do is push a MINI out of the ditch and up the hills surrounding the AideRSS HQ, we’ve actually been busy working on the design and development of some exciting new features.

Today we’re announcing the availability of the AideRSS PostRank RSS Extension. “So big deal!” you say. Well actually yeah it is. This means your reader can now expose this element and as a result you can sort your feeds by PostRank similar to how our “MyFeeds” reader works today. Now you can “Read What Matters”, not read what was just published.

Obviously, we’d love to see broad support in RSS Readers, so if you’re interested in adding PostRank to your app, drop us a line or fire away with any questions.

Additionally, because we’ve exposed the PostRank as a data element we’ve unlocked the potential for some interesting mash-ups. Munge your feeds through Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly or the mash-up platform of your choice. Create a news alert service from your best feeds or with some geo-coding, plot your Top Posts on a map. Ok, the last one was a stretch but it would still be fun. Let us know what you come up with.

Now a brief delve into the technical. First you’ll notice that the AideRSS feeds now include a new namespace:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:aiderss="http://aiderss.com/xsd/2007-11-30/aiderss" .... /> 

Next, within each RSS Item you’ll see the PostRank element.

<item>

      <title>StartupCamp Toronto - More Details</title>
      <link>http://www.startupnorth.ca/2007/...</link>
      <comments>http://www.startupnorth.ca...</comments>
      <wfw:commentRss>http://www.startupnor...</wfw:commentRss>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:42:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://www.startupnorth.ca/2007/11/26/st.../</guid>

      <aiderss:postrank>10.0</aiderss:postrank>

      <description>We are VERY excited to announce the line
      up for StartupCamp Toronto. But first, a big thank you
      to our sponsors. And not just because we couldn't have
      put together this event without them. Sponsors These
      folks are in the business of making startups successful,
      without them a startup' s chances drop significantly and
      then we'd have nothing [...]</description>

</item>

That’s it. I told you it would brief. Please let us know what you think.