Loving aideRSS

Tough love, that is—there’s a lot more I want out of this.

But first, aideRSS is awesome. When I serve it a blog’s feed, it looks at how many comments, delicious saves, and other mentions each post has and then divides them up according to their popularity relative to one another. AideRSS offers me a feed for each division—the smallest circle of the “best posts,” a larger circle of “great posts,” and an even larger circle of “good posts.”

I’ve got two main uses for it. It ups the signal-to-noise ratio on blogs that aren’t worth reading in their filtered state, given my peculiar tastes. And it allows me to keep current with the most popular posts of blogs I don’t have time to read every single day. That’s huge.

There are real problems, however, and other curious behaviors.

Consider Marc Andreessen’s blog pmarca. For one, AideRSS strips out his byline (here’s the “good” feed). For two, it has recently really oddly clipped his most recent posts and made them partial feeds (I also follow Andreessen’s full feed, and it is still full). Also, aideRSS also seems to strip out all the original dates and replace them with some date of its own.

That’s a problem. Google Reader published Andreessen’s post called “Fun with Hedge Funds: Catfight!” on August 16, 2007. But it’s the most recent post in AideRSS’s filtered feed of Andreessen’s “good” posts. The problem is that it follows “The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 8″ in the “good” feed but precedes it in the regular feed.

Did the post about the hedge funds and the cat fight receive some very recent comments, more than a few days after it was first published? All else equal, it wouldn’t be a problem to have the posts out of order—that would seem to be the sometimes inevitable result of late-coming comments or delayed delicious saves, etc. But all else is not equal—because the original dates are stripped. Posts in a blog exist relative to one another in time. Stripping out the dates and then reordering the posts smothers those important relationships.

But let’s look to the horizon. AideRSS can’t handle amalgamated feeds. I want to serve it what Scoble calls his link blog—the feed of all the very many items he shares in Google Reader—and receive only the most popular. That way, I would get the benefit of two different kinds of networked news at once. I’d get the intersection of the crowd’s opinion and the trusted expert’s opinion.

I’d also like to serve it a big mashup of lots of feeds—say, my favorite five hundred, routed through Pipes—and have it return the top two percent of all posts. That kind of service could compete with Techmeme, but it could be dynamic. We could all build our own personalized versions of Techmeme. That would be huge.

Trying it out a few different ways gave wild results. The posts in an amalgamated feed weren’t exactly being compared to one another on a level playing field—so that even a relatively bad TechCrunch post with ten comments crushes an small-time blogger’s amazing post with eight comments. But they also weren’t being compared to one another only by way of their numerical rankings derived from their first being compared to the other posts in their original feed.

Why can’t aideRSS measure each post’s popularity with respect to its kin even when it’s among strangers? The share function within Google Reader gives aideRSS the original url for each post. Can’t aideRSS take the original url for each post, find the original feed for each post, and then analyze each post against the other posts in its original feed? That would be much more analysis, for sure, but it would also be much more valuable. I’d love to see it.

Of course, while it may be a surprise or unintuitive at first, all this is really just one particular take on the first and second components of networked news—pulling in your news from a network of publishers and from a network of readers, including friends and experts and others. Without my additions, aideRSS represents just the second component, in which we get news based on whether others are reading it and participating in the conversation around it. My additions bring a little of the first component.

UPDATE: It would also be awesome to serve aideRSS the feed generated by a WordPress tag or by a persistent Google News search. That would be bringing in a shade of the third component of networked news.

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