The Dawn of Intelligent Aggregation

This past week AideRSS and RSS Mixer announced services I’ve needed for quite a while. Both companies offer users the ability to define parameters for their RSS feed aggregation.

I, like many people, struggle to keep up with my daily blog reading (a*hem, research). Even though I often prune back my blog reading list (based on what I’ve determine to be frequency and continuation or origination of “interesting” ideas), I attempt to keep up with 70 feeds a day.

While both services allow you to aggregate your RSS feed and put levels of filters and prioritization, AideRSS shows the biggest promise.

AideRSS filtering service is built upon a proprietary ranking system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog tracked. PostRank uses the collective input from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines. But what I really like is one feature that exists now, and one that will be launched in the near future.

NOW: So how does AideRSS handle a blog posting from Techcrunch vs. Glass Bottom Brain? By normalizing the PostRank system: “I look at the number of comments, number of bookmarks the visitors made, and the number of trackbacks. I collect this information from the internet and then normalize each post against the average for the blog in question – if you always get 15 comments, then you getting 17 comments doesn’t affect the ranking as much as, say getting 15 comments when you usually get 2.” (Ilya Grigorik)

After playing with AideRSS I emailed AideRSS and asked about near future enhancements. This is the part I love, and I’ve unabashedly scooped this one.

SOON: In the near future, AideRSS will more than likely allow you to enter keywords/phrases to track in addition to the existing aggregation and ranking functionality. That means if I want to follow software start-ups funded in Colorado, those posting can be prioritized and would get my attention first.