Prioritizing your reading list and doing rapid niche research using AideRSS
08.31.07
AideRSS is a service I've wanted to make creative use of for some time. It's neat - you supply an RSS feed and it ranks posts in that feed in order of reader engagement. The company is Canadian, too, and Canadian internet stuff is totally hot.
AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often - reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it's nothing to bet the bank on, but there's some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I've contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.
That's all well and good, it's a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts - but I know there's a lot more that's possible here.
Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I've tagged "toread" in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including "good posts", great posts or only the best posts. Here's a widget displaying the best posts currently in my "toread" feed, according to AideRSS.
Isn't that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don't capture anything personalized - but nonetheless, I think there's some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren't always accurate, either - hopefully that will improve.)
Here's an idea I thought of previously: say you're looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There's an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog's community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers' reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.
These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn't want to depend too much on a tool that's as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.
If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead's recent post on APML - Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.
Thanks for reading.
September 1st, 2007 at
This is great Marshall. I’ve been trying to put AideRSS to use this week, using a mixed feed (through feedblendr) to follow specific tracking areas (such as web 2.0), an idea I saw on another blog that was attributed to you. I haven’t had a whole lot of success yet, with AideRSS choking more often than not. But, for the few successes I’ve had, I can see the value of it.
I’ve also pondered the niche problem before (finding the top blogs for a new area of interest), I’ll have to try technorati more for that. Tag combinations in del.icio.us were my best bet before, i.e. realestate+blog. I wish Google Reader would aggregate feed tags too (feeds most tagged “real estate”).
September 1st, 2007 at
Hey Ryan, sounds like we’re in related lines of work - and local too! Thanks for your comment. I woke up this morning thinking about Sphere as a means of discovering top blogs. Would love to keep finding more ways as Technorati does not seem very vibrant and I wonder how many blogs launched in the last 6 months have added themselves to the blog directory. none the less, that blog directory is the best thing about technorati imho.
let me know if you come up with any strokes of brilliance re this
September 1st, 2007 at
I’ve played with aiderss a bit as well. I love the concept, hate the distribution channel. It feels like an aggregator service. I want the feeds hitting my reader to be personally relevant; AideRSS looks for what’s popular - two entirely different things.
Not giving up on them yet, but…
September 1st, 2007 at
Nice to see you stopping by, Aaron. I’m hoping that by combining my own tagging of what’s relevant to me and then filtering to see what’s most popular amongst those items I can have some of both worlds. Have you looked at APML yet? It might serve you well, I don’t know yet. Good luck in all your work, by the way!
September 1st, 2007 at
Hey Marshall. I was just d twittering Chris Saad about it last night. I’ve played a bit with apml but not with engagd yet. I hope to find some time this weekend. Hope all’s well.
September 1st, 2007 at
Heya Marshall and Aaron.
As you guys have alluded - APML can indeed add a ‘personal relevancy’ angle to the whole thing.
I’ve offered the guys at AideRSS to use the Engagd.com API to add personal relevancy but they have not gotten back to me yet.
With Engagd.com you can give it your lifestream - and it will build an APML file for you.
Then you can give it your reading list and it will give you filtered feeds based on Personal Relevancy.
The UI is a bit raw at the moment because Engagd is actually designed as an API platform for other apps to take advantage of - the UI is just for testing purposes.
BTW Personal Relevancy can/does take into account popularity - but is more about your personal interests.
Cheers
September 1st, 2007 at
I get where you’re coming from Marshall. I typically take the route of blocking noise vs discovering buzz. I’ll have to try it.
@Chris - when you say popularity is accounted for, are you talking about (explicit) rank that I’m driving? That makes more sense to me than a rank given by popular opinion. (What’s popular to me vs what’s popular to the world is typically pretty different.)
As an aside, I would be interested in what’s popular to friends / colleagues (met or otherwise). Take the opml of someone like Brian Oberkirch or Richard MacManus, for instance - I’d be interested to know what they’re paying attention to within it. That would do a lot more for me than aggregation services / apps like techmeme.
September 1st, 2007 at
@Aaron
Popularity is perhaps the wrong word. Authority and Influence is probably better. A post about Dogs from a highly ranked Dog blogger is probably more personally relevant than a post about an obscure blogger that sprung up yesterday.
That being said, source authority is but a small factor. The focus is on your APML file and how closely the content matches your personal Attention Profile.
In regard to tracking the attention of others, I think you will find that subscribing to user lifestreams (and leveraging them in other ways) will become combined with APML filtering via services like Engagd (or apps that consume the Engagd API) will become very popular.
It’s your own personal Techmeme based on sources you trust filtered by Personal Relevancy.
I wonder if FeedRinse couldn’t be the killer UI for the Engagd functionality
September 2nd, 2007 at
[…] Marshall Kirkpatrick ยป Prioritizing your reading list and doing rapid niche research using AideRSS Interesting way to build on to of the emergent nature of web2.0 (tags: collaboration web2.0 rss) […]
September 2nd, 2007 at
Marshall, thanks for the great review & the tips. We’ll certainly be looking into each of your suggestions and problem that you’ve pointed out above (counts & wrong rankings). At the moment we’re working hard on getting the basics of our architecture and content delivery right, and I’m looking forward to getting over these hurdles and to the stage where we can start improving on our current feature set.
@Ryan: just sent you an email to follow up on some of the problems you’ve mentioned.
@Aaron & Chris: Indeed, personal relevancy is a direction we will definitely take in the future. I like the concept of APML, and I could see us integrating in into our product.
@Chris: I did get your email, and we’re exploring the engagd API.
September 6th, 2007 at
[…] Reading feeds is just one of a million ways you can use RSS. Check out these other services that leverage your feeds in different ways. *BlogRovr - alerts you whenever the URL your browser is visiting has been linked to by any of the feeds in your OPML file. Great in theory, hasn’t proven useful yet to me in practice. Maybe it will for you. *AideRSS - Ranks items in each feed by relative number of comments, inbound links, times dugg and tagged in del.icio.us. Very interesting but has some kinks to work out. See my full post about AideRSS. *Particls - Windows only desktop dream-come-true, it seems to me. Did I mention that it’s Windows only? Yeah, I did, a thousand times to the people that built it even. *Zaptxt - I don’t want to tell you about this. I don’t want anyone but me to use this. […]
October 26th, 2007 at
Did you give Readeroo a lookie? I sent it to you via tweet but not sure if you’re following me / got it.
http://www.monsur.com/projects/readeroo/
It’s firefox integration for a delicious toread/read queue.