Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

AideRSS is a RSS filter service that helps user to identify important news and blogs. This service implements the PostRank algorithm that analyzes the popularity of individual feed items on the Web, and assigns each item with a number score. Feed items with a high score are considered more important and worthy of reading.

How does it work? See AideRSS video demo.

I think AideRSS is a very useful service. Many people face the problem of information overloading. The few dozens RSS feeds that we subscribe to don’t really help to solve the problem. Sometimes I think the ease-to-use RSS technology actually contributes to my information-overloading anxiety. AideRSS’s “intelligent” filtering can help to reduce the amount of time that we need to spend on manually filtering out information noise and reading only news that matter.

Nevertheless, AideRSS is not a silver bullet. Because the PostRank algorithm relies on external information such as trackbacks, post comment traffics etc. to rank individual feed items, it could falsely assign low ranks to important news that hasn’t yet been widely discussed in major social Web sites (e.g., del.icio.us, bloglines and technorati).

I think I will try out AideRSS service in the next couple weeks and see how it works. While I see there are obvious weaknesses in this service, but it’s definitely a major step towards solving our information overloading problem.

I just discovered that IEEE Computer Society now offers the availability of the latest magazines and transactions content through RSS. Now you can monitor your favorite IEEE magazines and journals the same way you monitor news and blogs.

Some of my favorite IEEE RSS include

• Computer
• IEEE Intelligent Systems
• IEEE Internet Computing
• IEEE Pervasive Computing

According to Jeff Thurston, there are at least five different types of blog web sites:

1. Commercial Blogs: written with a financial view - sensitive to causing maximum financial return and oriented toward causing a stir to attract readers. Blogging for financial gain alone is different than blogging as a columnist, for example.
2. News Blogs: Basically scanning the news and re-writing what already exists. Original content is low. Regurgitated content is high.
3. Original Content Blogs: Strives for original content, links to existing content in exceptional circumstances to support original content. Opinionated. Perceptive.
4. Advert Blog: Sharply written to look like a blog but serving as advertisement. Usually easy to pinpoint over time.
5. Blog Aggregators: This is a special group, [which captures the blogs of a particular community or a specific topic].

Blog aggregators are great because they save me a lot of time on discovering new blogs. They also produce aggregated RSS feeds of all the blogs that I want to read.

Two blog aggregator sites that I monitor closely:

• Planet RDF — blogs that talk about RDF, OWL and the Semantic Web
• Planet Geospatial — blogs written by GIS Professionals and Hobbyists

The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog is a blog that combinds the two (sort of) …