A View from the Isle

Last week aideRSS re-launched PostRank and unveiled a new Firefox extension to help you pick and subscribe to a site’s best stuff.

You all know that I’m a huge fan of aideRSS and I rely on it to cull my information firehose to a dull roar. You might have expected me to jump right on the PostRank XPI bandwagon and blog about it. Well I wanted to mull over what I thought it’s real value was going to be first.

Melanie posed a similar question—PostRank Blog › But how is PostRank applicable to ____?—and now I have the answer. PostRank nourishes the RSS ecosystem. The larger its database of feed is, the best aggregate results it can give over the long haul.

I expect that in the future you’ll be able to choose “Best of” feeds from various genre based on the data collected, the data we’re submitting.

After installing the xpi, sign in and such, you’ll notice a little rectangle at the bottom right of the window. I’ll let Melanie explain all the whats and whys there, but one point that I want to stress…if you happen upon one of your favourite blogs and the box says “unindexed” click the RSS icon in the address bar and add it to the index.

You can later come back and subscribe to it through the same button (and choose the filtering level), but the important thing is that the feed and content are now in the ecosystem to be mined later by all of us.

Related to all this, I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes and did a little fun thing. First I exported a set of feeds from FeedDemon, then imported them into PostRank. This created a channel (default is “Good” filtering) with the name of the group. I took that new combined feed and then passed it through this simple pipe I made (all it does is filter out duplicates) and now I have a nice concentrated feed. I also did this with a combined feed of all the shared items people set in Google Reader, etc which then gives me the “Great” stuff without duplicates.

Here is the pipe to check out.

The more I play with these new tools, the more ideas I’m getting for new stuff to come next.

Oh how I wish I could code.

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Tags: aideRSS, Meta feeds, PostRank, RSS, Yahoo Pipes