Sort Your Feeds By The Quality Of The Posts

AideRSS is pretty cool. I've been playing with it for a few days now and I see a lot of potential here.

Figuring Out What To Read The Old Way

There are a lot of feeds out there. A lot. And if you are anything like me, you are subscribed to a lot of them. There is simply no way to actually read them all.

You have to pick and choose. Until now the only real way to do that was to look at headlines and make a snap judgment. Read or not read.

Unfortunately, some very smart people who write some very good posts simply aren't all that good at writing killer headlines, or even intelligible headlines. So this method means missing some good stuff, and reading some bad stuff that doesn't live up to the headline.

The measure Of A Feed: Post Rank

Now there is a better way. Or at least a new way to enhance the old way.

AideRSS has developed something they call Post Rank 1 which they use to evaluate and rank posts on a scale of 1 to 10 with decimal values at each level.

Post Rank is based on The 5 Cs of Engagement2 and uses these principles to arrive at a quality score, called a Post Rank, based on the engagement the post receives from the community at large.

Sorting And Filtering Feeds Based On Engagement

To some greater or lesser extent this system is going to be valuable in direct proportion to how well you would agree that engagement is going to tend to equate to quality. In other words, if you agree that when a lot of people post about, comment on, click through to, link to and book mark a post, it is more likely to be worth reading than posts that do not garner such attention, then you are going to love AideRSS.

Using these engagement factors, each post has a post rank, and you can sort your feeds by their post ranks, and even filter out posts below a certain threshold. This leaves you with just the best posts (or the better, or the good, depending on the filter you chose) to read through. There is even a sort for the "top 20" posts for the view you are looking at.

Read It There Or take It With You

The Feed reader at AideRSS is a very simple easy to navigate reader. It is quick and presents information is a well thought out easy to follow format. But if that's not to your liking there are a couple of ways to take the feeds, with their filtering and sorting with you to your favorite reader.
AideRSS Feed Reader: You can read your filtered feeds right there at AideRSS, or in your own reader.
You can first of all filter all feeds at once to a certain level, and you can filter each feed individually. So you could filter all feeds in your list for the best posts, and then selectively change a few feeds that you like more to a lower criteria.

You can grab feeds for these filtered feeds from AideRSS and import them to your own feed reader to read the filtered feeds there. And, yes, there is full OPML support so it's easy to do.

The other cool option is a Firefox extension that adds Post Rank filtering and sorting to Google Reader. I've been using this a lot, and I love it.
AideRSS In Google Reader: You can use AideRSS Post Rank to filter and sort feeds in Gogle Reader.

1. 1. PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. It is a core part of the AideRSS engine that works to ensure that this digital assistant is helping you to tame the RSS beast and keep your news stream manageable.
2. 2. The 5 Cs of Engagement are Creating, Critiquing, Chatting, Collecting and Clicking.