Google Analytics (s goog) is a great tool for tracking who’s visiting your site and when, but how do you track things like the number of people discussing your content? PostRank (a company that we’ve covered previously) aims to provide that capability with its new PostRank Analytics service, which launches in public beta today. I was lucky enough to have access to the private beta over that last couple of weeks, and it looks to be a useful service, particularly for bloggers.

If you’ve used Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics will feel familiar, although it has a nicer-looking design. Once you’ve logged into the service, you get an overview of your site’s stats via a Flash-based chart (you can select to view last week, last month, last three months, or a custom period).

One thing that is different from Google Analytics, though, is the metrics you can track using the app. Not only do you get to keep an eye on your page views and visitors (PostRank Analytics will pull this data from your Google Analytics account, if you have one, for increased accuracy), you can also track “Engagement,” which is an aggregate score based on many times your content is commented on, how often it’s mentioned on Twitter, how many comments it has on FriendFeed, how many people bookmarked it using Delicious, etc.

Hit the “Analyze” tab to see a list of recently published posts, together with traffic and engagement stats for each of them, and individual scores based on number of Twitter mentions, bookmarks, etc:

Drill down further by clicking on a post title to bring up the “Analyze Story” page, which features traffic and engagement charts for that particular post. You can also get to these pages from the timeline on the Overview page.

Usefully, the “Analyze Story” pages also contain a “conversation feed,” which brings together tweets, comments, blog posts and bookmarks related to that content, so that you can see  — at a glance — what people are saying about your content.

You can also choose to receive a daily “Concierge Report” in your email. In its current iteration, I don’t find this to be that useful, as it just contains basic page view and engagement stats — it would be better if it was customizable, like the reports that Google Analytics can generate.

While I’d like to see more detail on how the “Engagement” score is actually calculated, and think it would be useful to be able to get separate charts for stats like Twitter mentions and Delicious bookmarks, I’m adding PostRank Analytics to my toolbox, because it provides data that’s not available elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting a better idea as to what’s being said about your content, and where, or if you’re just a stats geek, PostRank Analytics is definitely worth checking out. It’s free during the beta; sign up at analytics.postrank.com.

Let us know what you think of PostRank Analytics in the comments.

Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.

My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content.

Filter high volume feeds. Many of the big technology news blogs have a huge volume of stories in the feed. The aggregated feed for the entire GigaOM network, for example, contains dozens of posts every day. I have a hard time finding the content relevant to me when I have to sort through a large number of posts, so I use Pipes to search these stories to find the ones that matter to me. The example pipe below shows how to filter the entire GigaOM network feed down to the few posts containing certain keywords.

Example: Filtering high volume feeds

Aggregate and filter less relevant content. There are certain categories of blogs that have outstanding content, but they rarely publish posts that I want to read. For me, this is true of industry analyst blogs. While I really want to hear about the latest research in online communities and social media, most of the reports published are on topics that are not interesting to me. The Pipe below is one that I use to aggregate 17 industry analyst blogs together into one feed while filtering the posts for a few keywords relevant to my interests.

Example: Analyst research blogs filtered for social media

Find the posts everyone else is reading. For news junkies like me, it helps to be able to find the posts that are generating the most buzz. PostRank, a service that used to be called AideRSS, simplifies this process by finding the most talked about posts from any RSS feed. I often use PostRank in conjunction with Pipes to rank and filter posts at the same time. The example below ranks the posts here on WebWorkerDaily with a feed containing only the posts that are generating the most conversation.

Example: PostRank for WebWorkerDaily and feed for the top posts

WebWorkerDaily PostRank

Both Yahoo Pipes and PostRank have an option to get the output as RSS, so I make sure that the results from these tools make it into my RSS reader. With these more efficient filtered feeds, I can remove some of the aggregated and filtered source feeds from my reader. By using these filtering techniques to further prune my feeds, I plan to spend less time catching up on feed reading and more time working, exercising, or spending time with friends and family.

What are your favorite filtering techniques?

Recently there was a mail floating around in one of the groups in my office. It was about how does one manage to tackle the information overload. I thought I could add something I do and I want in my ‘perfect’ or to say ‘Killer’ RSS Feed reader for me.

1. Be Online, Simple UX, Shared feeds of own & friends, Favorite feeds, Search … :

Here, in simple terms, I’m just mentioning the features of Google Reader (I know you guessed it correctly!) – it’s simple, less cluttered – best of all it’s online which enables me to access the feeds anytime anywhere. I also like the ‘Shared Feeds’ with which I’m able to share the feeds I find is interesting with all my friends; Of course other features like one-click favorite of items, search are also very good – above all, it’s free as well . But I hate it when it bloats my browser’s memory foot print. I feel online feed readers have clear advantage in this category, at least for me.

There are few new feed readers coming up on the ‘cloud’ (simply as hosted applications). But it’ll take some time for a new one to replace Google Reader for me. I also like if instead of ‘only web’ if the feed reader on both ‘desktop+web’ is better (something like mesh).

I guess most readers will choose Google Reader as their favorite, but still I got to ask here: Do you use any other feed reader apart from Google Reader (be it desktop or on the cloud). Netvibes, PageFlakes, Newsgator or just your iGoogle…

2. A good RSS Ranking/ Rating system on top of it:

I like AideRss and the Firefox plug-in for Google Reader that is available. When I’m in a hurry, I really just go ahead and read only the top feeds which AideRss shows me as the ‘Best’.

But I do realize ranking the feeds at ‘real time’ is quite complex and always challenging and it works best for feeds that are at least little older. There is lot of opportunities to improvise in this front. Looking at the milestones of AideRss, I’m hoping for better ranking of the feeds.

Do you use any other feed ranking systems that you feel is good?

Update 10/17: Melanie from AideRSS has commented about the improvement made to AideRss.

3. When I read news, I like the way Newspapers do it….

I came across GreatNews RSS reader quite sometime back – the one thing I like the best about it is it’s Full page reading style which makes me to ‘read all feeds in a glimpse’ – Like a newspaper. Like it right? (I know it is a desktop reader – I keep switching between GReader & GreateNews once in a while. )

Among other features in GreatNews, I like labeling, channel statistics, new items highlight, search – which are very basic but are important too.

The River of News Approach: There is a another better way of displaying news in a reader ‘River of News’ (by Dave Winer) – which improves ‘the reading experience’ (I felt is GreatNews also tries to achieve the same in another approach). But the some of the sample implementations of River of News didn’t satisfy (or impress) me – displaying the feeds as a huge list (river) of links with small description doesn’t make my reading better & definitely doesn’t give a news paper like feel.

I’m not saying the approach is flawed. Also even GreatNews sports the ‘Folder-by-Folder’ view only which again is painful to read one by one.

My preferred way of reading, call it ‘My News’: I’d like it better this way: All my top news(feeds) on page1, my tech news on page 2, personal feeds on page 3, sports on page 4, astronomy on 5, … – all listing ‘top ranked’ news items in neatly laid out way. This is just logical grouping of my feeds in different categories’. GreatNews has a very good start here. All it needs is a good ranking system being integrated to it.

I’d have the ‘River of News’ as my Second best liked way of reading feeds (and third method being the folder-by-folder view ) This way, once the ‘My News’ is reading is done, I switch to ‘the River view’ and then later to the remaining news if I really have time to spend on.

4. An IM bot – to just keep me updated at troubled times…

I don’t like to keep my feed reader always open, but I do have my Instant Messenger sign-in all time. So, an IM bot for all my top feeds will try to fulfill my hunger for the information & free me from the ‘information overload’ at least when I’m into serious office work.

There are lots of RSS IM Bots presently available, I use iNezha (Anothr) bot to stream my top ranked (feeds that AideRss categorizes as ‘Best’) to my IM.

On a final note,

1. I didn’t mention about the mobile version of all this because given the popularity and potential opportunities available in mobile apps, it is just trivial that all the above features should be available in the mobile version of the ‘killer’ feed reader.
2. There are separate breed of blog aggregators: fine example being Techmeme – These are public feed aggregators but might directly influence one’s reading habits. I know people who wake up to read Techmeme .
3. and, this post contains references to different tools and methods how I presently manage my feeds. But every other tool/ technology is still in growing stage, so you might find it limiting – whenever you think your favourite tool is lacking something, do note it down somewhere to add it here as comment.
4. I’m not really sure if I’ll be creating such a reader immediately. Need to think about it.
5. Here we explored how to manage feeds. There are whole different and huge source of information:
   1. Email subscriptions – via Groups of Y!, MSN, G
   2. Social network participation
   3. Bookmarks & Sharing (delicious), etc – I guess each would deserve it’s own blog post!

What do you think about this? Don’t forget to Comment/ Criticize/ Share this!

Spread the knowledge! Share this post!!:

АideRSS (линка е към резултатите от блога ми за avtorentacar) е интересен инструмент за изследване на публикациите в блгоа ви. Благодарение на него можете да проверите колко популярна е една статия спрямо другите. По този начин ще забележите какво е интересно на читателите ви, което пък улеснява вас.
Знаейки какво се търси е много по-лесно да пишете по точно опредлена тема от колкото да налучквате дали на хората ще им е интересно за Бербатов или пък се интересуват от Катето Евро.

Освен популярността на статията в сравнението с другите в блога ви, инструмента показва дали тя присъства в delicious, колко коментара има, дали е в digg, извадка от текста и колко туит-а има

Проверете сами. Лично според мен инструмента е много полезен при изследване на читателския интерес.

I think the answer is that it depends. They can certainly help you find that “needle in the haystack”. On the other hand, how often do you scroll past the first two pages of a Google search?

University of Chicago sociologist James Evans recently weighed in on this topic and it’s interesting to consider what he has to say. His article in Science Magazine (also summarized in  The Economist and blogged about by Nicholas Carr) looks at whether the internet is changing how academics approach research.

The impact of search engines:

Evans argues that electronic search engines are making things faster and easier, but they may also be making us lazier.

“The easy online availability of sources has channeled researcher attention from the periphery to the core—to the most high-status journals. In short, searching online is more efficient, and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars,” writes Evans.

Evans suspects that the same experience is true for most non-academic users of Google: everyone is looking at the same high-ranking, highly accessible, most easily available sites.

Certain sites get the most play:

Stories on news sites such as  are Yahoo!Buzz filtered by popularity. Editors can gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and sort stories by their popularity.  The most popular stories get the most play.  Social news sites such as Digg,  Reddit and Mixx also allow readers to vote on stories and the most  popular stories rise to the top. Tools such as AideRSS enable readers to quickly sort through their RSS subscriptions and identify the most interesting and talked about posts. These are useful in their own right, but if we limit ourselves to the most popular items, we may be missing out.

Should we care?

“Following an ecological metaphor, having a more diverse population-level pool of genes becomes important when the environment changes—when new diseases and predators and weather patterns challenge us. New scientific findings and ideas may not fit the prevailing paradigms, but when the world changes or when doubts arise, retaining inconsistencies in our global memory becomes important as we try to craft a new understanding, ” say Evans.

What can we do?

1. When conducting searches, considering broadening rather than narrowing your search. Search on a range of items rather than making all of the items ‘required’.
2. If you enjoy reading someone’s post, visit their blog and see what else they’ve written. It’s the modern day equivalent of flipping through a magazine.
3. In addition to reading a post, read the comments. And better yet, extend the conversation by leaving one of your own.
4. In addition to Google, search on a social bookmarking site such as Delicious or Ma.gnolia

What do you think? Do you agree with Evans? What strategies might we use to extend the conversation and give air to contrasting points of view?

Photo credit: Louise Roach

Ya hablé de aideRSS cuando estaba en fase beta, ahora descubro que ya está en abierto y que tiene una estética mejorada.

Se trata de un complemento para Firefox que añade un campo con puntuaciones de los post que hay en los feeds a los que estás suscrito en G**gle Reader, estas puntuaciones las saca de los enlaces hacia esos post, de las estrellas que les ponen los usuarios, de los que comparten, etc.

El complemento para Firefox, ahora tiene versiones como script de GreaseMonkey y como complemento independiente para usarlo con G**gle Reader, y ya funciona con Firefox 3.

Pongo una captura de como se ve en funcionamiento.

In questo post Rohit Bhargava sottolinea 4 difetti degli attuali strumenti di misurazione dei blog e analizza un sistema per risolverli. Alcuni dei problemi nella misurazione dei blog sono:

-          Gli RSS alterano la maggior parte delle metriche tradizionali: in quanto la maggior parte degli utenti non ha bisogno di passare per il sito e in questo modo si riducono le pageview. D’altro canto, si ottiene un maggiore engagement da parte dei lettori

-          I link in entrata non sono tutti uguali: considerarli tutti uguali porta a ricompensare ingiustamente chi fa “linkbait listing”.

-          Molti sistemi di monitoraggio (es: technorati) non considerano tutto il contenuto di un blog, ma solo i post più recenti.

-          Ci sono molti modi di misurare l’engagement: non bastano i link e i commenti di un blog, perciò sarà necessario nell’ambito della misurazione dei blog, individuare altre metriche che permattano di valutare se le persone sono davvero ”engaged” rispetto ai contenuti di un blog

Uno strumento che si propone proprio di misurare il social engagement è quello proposto da Melanie Baker, la community manager della startup canadese AideRSS. Il sistema offre una feature, denominata PostRank, che misura l’engagement di ogni post del blog, su una scala da 1.0 a 10.0, dove i post che generano la maggiore attività ottengono il massimo punteggio. Il sistema, per attribuire il punteggio a ciascun post, tiene conto del numero dei commenti, delle segnalazioni su del.cio.us e dei voti su digg, del numero di twits che segnalano l’url.

Con questo sistema si ottengono delle valutazioni distinte per ciascun post, invece di una sola valutazione per l’intero blog, e questo permette di capire quali sono i post che generano più engagement. Infine il sistema può rendere più utile la sottoscrizione ai feed, aiutando gli utenti a filtrare i post più discussi.

Secondo Rohit Bhargava, il servizio attualmente presenta due punti deboli: in primo luogo il ristretto sottoinsieme di siti che usa per valutare l’engagement, senza tener conto di alcuni importanti social network come Ning o Facebook e il fatto che AideRSS è focalizzato sui siti statunitensi, perdendo le discussioni internazionali. La seconda limitazione riguarda alcune metriche che potrebbero migliorare il quadro dell’influenza dei blog, come il numero di sottoscrittori o le affiliazioni del blog.

Tuttavia questo tipo di approccio è sicuramente interessante in quanto capace di combinare l’esigenza dei blogger di capire come produrre contenuto di miglior qualità e l’esigenza dei lettori di decidere quali post sono più interessanti e meritano maggiore attenzione. Aggiungo dicendo che è molto probabile che a breve questo tipo di metrica verrà inclusa anche all’interno della piattaforma Blogmeter.

Thanks to my creative friend and colleague, Sherry Heyl, for her favorite things poem-post about all the tools you need to smooth your ride in the Networked Economy, and have some fun. I love it! Remember how we memorized the names of the states with a poem in third grade? This may well be another such historical archive. Thanks, Sherry!

When I wrote about AideRSS for the first time about a year ago the company was only a couple of months old. Their slogan said best what it was they tried to do (and succeeded in quite well): Read what matters. AideRSS was built as a service that would help you overcome the struggle keeping up with your RSS feeds. Ideally you would upload your OPML (or add feeds manually) and you could then based on a few metrics skim feeds to only the most popular posts. On top of that it would allow you to create a new feed of that… basically mashing up feeds to make them more readable. I loved it instantaneously (as did Marshall Kirkpatrick apparently).

Not long before that post on AideRSS I had written about the lack of innovation at Technorati and where they were missing some opportunities. Today Technorati has made itself irrelevant: there are way better blogsearch engines out there (like Google’s) and their so-called Authority metric is ridiculous. Anyway – back to the point – the opportunities I called out for Technorati are still there and when I saw AideRSS for the first time I considered they could be the ones to deliver upon these opportunities. Interestingly enough, it looks more and more like it that they will. AideRSS isn’t just that ‘read what matters’ service anymore, it has grown into an engagement tracking service, measuring storytelling ROI as they call it. And that’s a great evolution. They’ve even gone beyond keeping their ranking method as they released a new site dedicated to that ‘Postrank’ and also developed a Google Reader extension for Firefox which I’ve been using for a short while now.

Hopefully they don’t stop there. When I look at the stats for my own feed, I can only notice that not all metrics are correct: too many comments counted, not enough delicious bookmarks counted, … so some finetuning is still in place. But it remains an overall solid service. And I’m pretty sure Melanie will pick up on this as well

Finally I believe they should give access to the full metrics AideRSS gathers for each blog (delicious, comments, …) and not only the Postrank itself. Imagine that you want to build your own bloglist with the top ‘x’ blogs in category ‘y’ but unlike Mack Collier or Peter Kim  you don’t want to look up all this data manually to collect in XLS etc etc to make your weekly or monthly list. What if I could enter all the blogs I want to track against each other in AideRSS where they let you choose which metrics you want to track them with (only Technorati? or maybe subscribers as well?…) and have AideRSS build my list automatically based on the weight I defined for each metric? You define how often the list needs to be re-calculated. You create a widget for your and participating blogs. You create a weekly/monthly autoposting rhythm to your blog etc etc… Wouldn’t that be a compelling offer? And of course AideRSS can take the learnings for what happens in the backoffice because all of that.

Continuamos hablando sobre los complementos para Firefox 3, esta vez Error 500 acaba de hacer una referencia sobre Postrank de AideRSS, en la que explican como AideRSS que es un agregador RSS intenta medir la importancia de cada articulo y ordena los contenidos en función de ello.

Lo más interesante es que siempre encontramos algo que nos ayuda en función de un add-on para Firefox es este caso en el que AideRSS se complace en ofrecer una extensión de Firefox para aprovechar el poder
de PostRank para marcar, filtrar y hacer un seguimiento de la ejecución de cualquier feed RSS directamente en GoogleReader.
Ahora los usuarios de GoogleReader pueden recuperar su tiempo con un solo clic del ratón para encontrar el mejor contenido, aumentar su productividad y mantenerse informado de las noticias.

Fuente de la Noticia.

PostRank

Thanks to my friend and blogger Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing for sharing a cool way to sift through the noise to what is important (Example: A blogger has invited you to post, how do you find out if it’s relevant, it’s importance, and the blog’s reputation?): you can use AideRSS (eh?).

Ilya Grigorik (I think!)- CTO of AideRss

Look for an increase in tech solutions that smooth our ride – and relationships – in the Networked Economy; and thank goodness! The more we can talk with something in common, the better we like each other.

9) Relationship Tech. As the soft trumps the hard, the most powerful technologies are those that enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand, and develop soft relationships of all types.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PennTellerGoodVideos

The good videos of Penn & Teller as filtered by AideRSS from Youtube, Google Video and Yahoo Video. Combined in Yahoo Pipes and burned in FeedBurner.

Subscribe to your favorite feed aggregator.

AideRSS does not support enclosures yet so you can’t use this in Miro. I’m going to create a Yahoo Pipe with enclosures soon.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CharicePempengco-Good

The good videos as filtered by AideRSS from Youtube, Google Video and Yahoo Video. Combined in Yahoo Pipes and burned in FeedBurner.

Subscribe to this feed on Miro or you favorite video aggregator.

Hace tiempo vi en genbeta un futuro complemento de Firefox que serviría para puntuar de forma automática los «feeds» que leamos a través de G**gle Reader.

El complemento se llama aideRSS y está en fase de beta privada pero me inscribí y esta semana pasada me mandaron el enlace. Lo he estado probando y me gusta, ya que me ayuda a no perderme cosas interesantes entre la maraña de sitios a los que estoy suscrito (esto debe ser algo así como un «síndrome de Diógenes de la información»).

Como inconveniente le veo que cada vez que te mueves entre grupos de suscripciones va puntuando los post , y que no se guardan en caché ni nada de eso, por lo que si vuelves a un grupo se vuelven a generar la puntuaciones. Pero en conjunto merece la pena una ayudita para filtrar tanta información como recibe un «yonqui de los datos».

Actualización importante: «No funciona en Firefox 3 de momento (18-junio-2008)».

RSS ist toll. Für die noch nicht wissen was RSS-Feeds sind oder was dieses Orange Symbol ist, sollten bei Chrisp vorbei schauen. Im Beitrag RSS-Feeds abonnieren zeigt er was RSS ist und wie man es abonniert. Hier sind auch direkt zwei Videos so, dass es nicht langweilig wird.

Nun für die anderen die schon RSS nutzen. Mit der Zeit sammelt sich echt viel an, also Webseiten von den man das RSS abonniert hat. Etwas Unterstützung bei der Organisation und Bewertung gibt jetzt die Seite AideRSS.com .Hier kann man sich anmelden und seine RSS-Feeds sammeln und organisieren. Das Tolle ist, es strukturiert für einen die Feeds. Mit Hilfe von verschiedenen Faktoren, werden die einzelnen Beiträge bewertet und in verschiedenen Klassen eingeteilt. So kann ich mir immer einfach die wichtigsten oder besten Beiträge lesen. Es gibt verschiedene Möglichkeiten die Inhalte zusammen zustellen. Was hilfreich ist, dass ich von meinen Listen auf AideRSS.com einen RSS abonnieren kann. z.B. kann ich von verschiedenen Basketball-Seiten die Feeds auf AideRss abonnieren. Dann kann ich sagen, er soll mir aus diesen die 10% Besten als RSS-Feed bereit stellen und ich abonniere nur diese noch. Habe 90% der Beiträge mir erspart.

Die Auswahl, was gut oder schlecht ist fällt z.B. über Anzahl Kommentare, Bookmarking bei SocialBookmarking Plattformen usw. Ich glaube AideRSS.com kann noch ein paar Dinge, aber habe noch nicht alles ausprobiert. Es gibt auch Einführungsvideos die helfen solle, zu verstehen wie man AideRSS.com nutzt und was es macht. Viel Spaß damit und schreibt mir mal Eure Erfahrungen und wo Ihr es einsetzt.

• تمام مادربوردهای شرکت ASUS به لینوکس مجهز می‌شوند
  کاربر این انتخاب را دارد که میان این لینوکس و سیستم‌عاملی که نصب کرده انتخاب کند.
• AIDERSS تویتر را هم به سیستم امتیاز دهی‌اش اضافه کرد
  تعداد توییت‌هایی که درباره یک نوشته شده، امتیاز آن‌را در سیستم PostRank اضافه می‌کند.
• اسرائیل و صهیونسیم هم معنا نیستند
  این نوشته را قبلا خوانده بودم اما سیبیل طلا که اشاره کرد دوباره خواندم. واقعا عالی نوشته.

---

مشترک خوراک بامدادی شوید
کامل
فقط مطالب
فقط لینکدونی

It’s time to write about one of my favourite inventions, ever; Ladies and Gentlemen, the right Honourable RSS! It’s always been at the back of mind to write about RSS, but it just seemed such a vast topic that I kept putting off R-Day. Until ReadWriteWeb rather belatedly reminded me that May 1st was actually RSS Awareness Day- aagh! I feel that I’ve let my trusty friend down by not celebrating- I mean stuff workers’ rights, this is far more important…

Anyway, I’m going to start with one of my pet RSS projects, because if ever I needed help with a project, it was this one. No yahoo pipes-esque inspiration yet, and I’ve been working on this for a lot longer… In a nutshell, the library is getting cut; people think everything is on google, no-one knows who those folk in specs and dowdy cardigans are anymore, blah blah blah. It’s hardly ground breaking news. So, we at the library make the obvious connection and decide that we need to start reaching out to people rather than wait for them to come to us. One of the librarians, who has been there for eons, states that in the past, when she received interesting emails she used to send them to interested people, a la SDI. Did they teach SDI at library school anymore? I have no idea what SDI is, and am trying to visualise the trusty acronym dictionary in my head in the vain hope that that might help me. It doesn’t. Bearing in mind I had only been at my job for less than two months, I decide to risk a cautious no. Right answer and full explanation ensues. (FYI, it’s Selective Dissemination of Information…right.) So she explains, and RSS immediately springs to mind. I had probably been indulging in some illicit feed reading moments before… Why don’t we start to build this up, with proper distribution lists of interested specialists (as I know about 4 people in the Bank. Knowledge Management indeed) and draw in more content with RSS? Library colleagues were a little hazy about RSS but that led to some ego boosting teaching opportunities and being known as the RSS guru, so it worked well for me… But anyway, this was last July, and I haven’t been able to move on from this basic idea yet. Basically, I set up distribution lists in most wonderful Outlook of joy (…), entitled “Health” or “Environment” for example. I set up RSS feeds for as many different providers who might provide interesting and worthwhile content that our patrons would like to see. I scan Bloglines twice a day, copy, paste and send the information to the patron distribution lists. It works. People are happy as they get new material which has been vetted by a librarian. We’ve expanded the service to include new journals and books. And we’re happy as we’re reaching people for sure, rather than just providing a RSS feed and hoping people sign up.

BUT- its not very cool. It was half cool maybe in 2004, but we’re in 2008. It’s very time consuming. It’s not automated. But I think it could be!! From the SLA listserv, it seems that no-on has much more of an idea than we do. There’re a couple of services: Ozmosys is one fr’instance, but although everyone wanted to know more about services, no-one seemed very happy with any of the solutions.

I’m fairly happy with the basic layer of the service- ie the groups of specialists and the information we’re receiving, though it would be good to expand this. The alerts are very relevant too, as they’re handpicked. Some of the ideas that I have been pondering in order to improve this involve:

• The Specialist Locater that the workplace may eventually crack on with sometime this millennium, (extract the tags/info that people add about themselves and their interests) (more about this later),
• OR somehow tag all the relevant information by publishing it in a blog (Bloglines has this feature to publish, but no tagging, sadly) and then extracting an RSS feed filtered by tag and sending it automatically to the distribution lists. (hmm, in my dreams?! Not sure about presentation issues…)
• OR as yet some other inspired solution!

I’ve been scouring the web for information about similar problems- and will write later about AideRSS, Readburner, and the like. Well, I will when I’ve read about them; the blog is really making me get my thoughts in order which is F.A.B!

Gracias al blog de Albert Armengol (Endocitosis de red) he sabido de la existencia de AideRSS. Albert lo mencionaba en un post sobre el filtrado de blogs, algo totalmente necesario si queremos estar informados y tener tiempo de aprovechar dicha información. Para realizar esta terea podemos utilizar algún sistema que haga el trabajo sucio por nosotros, algo como Menéame o Digg donde los usuarios valoran las noticias y se colocan en portada las más votadas o utilizar algo como AideRSS que automatiza este proceso. A diferencia de Digg o Meneame, con AideRSS los usuarios no mandan noticias para que sean valoradas por otros usuarios sino que el propio sistema se encarga de monitorizar aquellos feeds que nosotros le indiquemos y valorarlos en funcion de su PostRank.

Por ejemplo podriamos utilizar AideRSS para decidir si incluimos un feed en nuestro agregador o establecer un determinado nivel de filtrado para ese feed y quedarnos solo con los post que pasen dicho filtro. La base de todo el sistema es el Postrank, una forma de valoración de posts en función de su relevancia y de las reacciones de los lectores, para calcular el PostRank es necesario que nosotros suministremos la URL del feed que queremos filtrar, a partir de ese momento AideRSS buscará información sobre el feed, calculará estadísticas y tratará de valorar las reacciones de los usuarios, finalmente asignará un PostRank a los artículos del feed y nos permitirá clasificarlos y ordenarlos.

En estos momentos lo estoy probando y por ahora me gusta lo que ofrece, aunque he de decir que me ha decepcionado que no sea capaz de mostrarme información sobre este blog ya que por algún motivo no ha podido procesar la URL del feed y se ha producido el error que se ve en la siguiente imagen.

En cualquier caso y para demostrar que el sistema funciona correctamente (dejando aparte este blog que nadie lee) tambien he probado a poner la URL del blog de Enrique Dans y he obtenido los resultados que muestro a continuación:

Como dato curioso señalar que de entre las últimas entradas del blog de Enrique la que ha obtenido un mayor PostRank es la que habla sobre nuestro querido Teddy Bautista.

Cooles Tool: Mit aideRSS kann man Blogs genauer unter die Lupe nehmen – und sogar Feeds selektiv abonnieren. Doch der Reihe nach. Das Problem hat man ja oft – man entdeckt ein Blog, ist sich aber nicht so sicher, was es außer dem einen Beitrag, über den man gerade gestolpert ist, noch zu bieten hat. Manchmal muss man sich ziemlich lang durchklicken, um sich das zu erschließen. Manche abonnieren den Feed dann auf Probe und stecken ihn im Feedreeder in einen entsprechenden Quarantäne-Ordner. Bei der vorherigen Analyse eines Blogs kann aideRSS wertvolle Hilfe leisten: Das Tool versucht, die einflussreichsten Beiträge eines Weblogs herauszufiltern (genau genommen funktioniert das Tool natürlich für jeden RSS-Feed).

Dabei wird unterstellt, dass ein Beitrag besonders wichtig ist, wenn er oft kommentiert, verlinkt, gebookmarked und gediggt ist. Genau dem geht aideRSS nach und spuckt für jedes Blog mehrere Listen aus. Zum Beispiel die 20 wichtigsten Artikel. Hübsch übersichtlich werden zum Beispiel die 20 nach diesen Kriterien wichtigsten Posts ausgespuckt.

Ich habe das mal für das Textdepot gemacht:

Auf einen Blick sieht man für jeden Beitrag die Zahl der Kommentare, der eingehenden Links, der del.icio.us-Bookmarks und der Diggs. Ein Klick auf den “More”-Knopf zeigt übrigens die ersten Zeilen des jeweiligen Artikels.

Neben den allfälligen Statistiken (z.B. durchschnittliche Zahl der Beiträge pro Monat) gibt es ein Feature, das besonders spannend klingt: Die Möglichkeit, einen existierenden RSS-Feed zu filtern. Hierbei wird wieder das System der Relevanz angewandt.

Je nach Interesse kann man also steuern, ob man z.B. nur die Posts mit einer gewissen Relevanz geliefert haben möchte. Wie zuverlässig das Ganze im Dauerbetrieb ist, weiß ich noch nicht – und die Gewichtung der einzelnen Faktoren (Kommentare pro Beitrag, Bookmarks, Links) ist sicher Geschmacksache und für mich nicht durchsichtig.

Dennoch: Das Tool ist sowohl für Bloginteressierte auf Entdeckungstour wie für Journalisten oder PR-Leute, die z.B. auf der Suche nach Fachblogs sind, vermutlich eine große Hilfe. Erfahrungsberichte sind herzlich willkommen.

(via Communication Overtones)

Ähnliche Artikel im Textdepot:

• Blog-Monitoring: 20 Tools und ein paar Tipps

همانطور که قبلا در مطلب «به خودتان رحم کنید و از AideRSS و گوگل‌ریدر استفاده کنید» نوشتم با توجه به گسترش روزافزون کمیت و کیفیت وب‌لاگ‌های فارسی، روز به روز امکان پی‌گیری و مطالعه آن‌ها دشوارتر می‌شود. حتی با استفاده از فید وب‌لاگ‌ها یا سرویس‌های جالبی مانند دودردو، باز هم فیدخوان‌ها از تعدد نوشته‌ سرریز می‌کنند. برای کاربرانی که وقت محدودی در شبانه‌روز را برای مطالعه وب‌لاگستان اختصاص داده‌اند، شاید مناسب‌تر باشد به جای این‌که فهرست بلندبالای پست‌های جدید همه وب‌لاگ‌ها را ورق بزنند، نگاهی به «گزیده»های هر وب‌لاگ داشته باشند. یعنی فقط بهترین پست‌های هر وب‌لاگ را ببینند. (معیار گزینش، مقایسه پست‌های یک‌وبلاگ با سایر پست‌های همان وب‌لاگ می‌باشد. به این ترتیب بهترین پست‌های هر وب‌لاگی شانس نمایش داده شدن را خواهند داشت.)

با استفاده از وب‌گاه جالب AideRSS می‌توان پست‌های یک وب‌گاه را بر اساس معیار PostRank طبقه‌بندی کرد. تصمیم گرفتم گزیده‌ای از پست‌های وب‌لاگ‌های فارسی را از طریق AideRSS انتخاب کرده و فیدش را در این وب‌لاگ قرار دهم.

بهبودسازی روش تعیین فید برگزیده

ابتدا تصور من بر این بود اگر فید وب‌لاگ‌های تجمعی مانند دودردو فارسی یا لینک‌های اشتراکی خودم در گوگل ریدر را در AideRSS قرار دهم، چکیده‌ جالبی از همه پست‌های وب‌لاگستان که در دودردو هستند را خواهم داشت. اما با توجه به این‌که AideRSS پست‌های هر منبع را با سایر پست‌های همان منبع مقایسه می‌کند، نتیجه کار روی فیدهای تجمعی مانند دودردو فارسی خوب از آب در نمی‌آید. بنابراین تصمیم گرفتم فید وب‌لاگ‌ها را به صورت منفرد توسط AideRSS گزینش کنم و محصول نهایی را در فیدبرنر بسوزانم. این‌کار نتیجه بهتری داد که الان هم در دسترس شماست. به این وسیله مشکل پست‌های تکراری هم حل شد، چون کلیه منابع متمایز و یکتا هستند.

تا این‌ لحظه 200 وب‌لاگ

در حال حاضر حدود 200 وب‌لاگ فارسی را که در چند هفته اخیر بیشتر فعال بوده‌اند و به خصوص به صورت نسبی پست‌هایشان در وب‌لاگستان مورد توجه قرار گرفته است را به این مجموعه اضافه کرده‌ام. فهرست این وب‌لاگ‌ها را با فرمت OPML می‌توانید از اینجا دریافت کنید. البته این فهرست در حال اضافه شدن است.

وب‌لاگ شما چطور؟

در صورتی که تمایل دارید وب‌لاگ شما نیز به این فهرست اضافه شود به من اطلاع دهید. البته اضافه شدن وب‌لاگ شما به این معنی نیست که پست‌های شما در «فید برگزیده وب‌لاگستان فارسی» لزوما دیده خواهند شد. چون انتخاب بهترین فیدهای شما به صورت خودکار انجام می‌پذیرد و بستگی به تعداد کامنت‌ها، تعداد دنبالک‌ها، تعداد ارسال‌ها به del.ico.us یا digg و سایت‌های مشابه دارد.

بخش بزرگی از وب‌لاگ‌ها لینک فید ندارند

متاسفانه هنوز بخش بزرگی از وب‌لاگ‌های فارسی و حتی تعداد قابل توجهی از وب‌لاگ‌های مشهور هنوز لینک فید نوشته‌های خود را در وب‌لاگشان قرار نداده‌اند. بسی جای تاسف است و فکر می‌کنم درباره اهمیت «فید» و «فیدخوان»ها اطلاع‌رسانی به مراتب بیشتری لازم است.

نظرات شما

اگر علاقه‌مند هستید فید بالا را آزمایش کنید. یا خودتان در AideRSS فید مشابهی درست کنید و امکانات مختلف آن‌را بررسی کنید. و در صورت امکان لطف کنید و نظرات خود را به من نیز بگویید.