Earthling

Sure, visit popularity, number of inbound links, and comments are good indicators that there have been people looking at and replying to an article. But does that all make it likelier that the information is going to be what *I'm* looking for? When I want to find the most talked about posts, there are sites devoted to that. My own daily reading ritual is deliberately not driven by that. There are aggregating sites like Findory that look at what articles you click to help determine what you find most interesting/useful. But the fact is, great blog entries get overlooked all the time or ignored for any number of reasons. Plenty of good stuff gets no comments at all. If the content isn't topical enough an entry may get skipped on a busy day. If it's not important enough to people who actively bookmark, it may not be referenced online. And if it's an obscure or tiny topic, the very fact that no one has bothered much with it might be what makes it very useful if it passes through my river of news. In my opinion, the likelihood of finding something good in an unexpected place is part of the allure of RSS. I think AideRSS should live at the level of your chosen RSS reader, and I'd like to see it include a manually adjustable and tunable random sampling system. How about choices like "show me every third entry from this source?" FeedRinse could do this as well, though I'd like to see it integrated as part of an approach to an RSS reader app. In many ways, using a river of news approach includes a high level of randomness anyway. Often I choose to skip stuff just because I'm trying to bite off a manageable chunk of information to eat.

For example, why has no RSS filtering system or Reader(that I know of) yet taken on the return-from-vacation-or-illness situation, when you walk in the door to a huge stack of mail? Information overload is more or less of a problem at different times, and it would be nice to see a solution that took that into account. Your reader should be able to tell that you have a much higher-than-usual stack of information waiting for you, and dole it out to you differently in that case. On light days, maybe it should do more recommending if you want it to. And it shouldn't pretend that all of the feeds you follow should be vetted based on the same criteria, One promising idea I've seen comes from a feature on an experimental product NY Times Labs did for Hack Day called Shifd. The feature in question is a "how much time do you have" slider that it uses to assemble a subset of all of your incoming information that will fit your current situation.

At right, the "how much time do you have?" slider.

Something like that could be a nice way to help manage how much information you chew on at each session.

If RSS is going to get more widespread adoption a la the big game we talk in the industry, more people need to understand what it can do to make updated content of many kinds portable. Just within the world of blogs, all blogs are not equal in format and approach, and entries on different types of blogs aren't best judged against each other. But then when my feeds include not just blogs I'm keeping up with as part of my job or interest area but also photos, facts, new book, concert, and CD releases, package tracking, comings and goings of friends, we ought to evolve some new tools quickly that recognize feeds do all these things and treats them accordingly. One place where you can see the early stirrings of this coming together is inside of Facebook with their new F8 applications. But a purpose-built RSS Reader would be a good place for it as well.