AideRSS - a new tool that may make a difference, sometimes for some of us
Aug 23rd, 2007 by Hans De Keulenaer
(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)
Loading ...Kris Hoet at Cross The Breeze introduces AideRSS, an RSS reader aiming to help you to ‘read what matters’. The tool is promising, though a bit error-prone. Early adopters: let’s give them some credit for a while.
The idea is to offer you a preselection of articles based on an algorithm calculating a PostRank. According to AideRSS:
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.
So the PostRank algorithm, while not disclosed, gives a quality rating of an article, based on comments and bookmarks.
Can a computer give us a reliable quality rating of an article, based on number of comments and bookmarks?
In the last century, we would have given these articles to experts, asking to rate their content according to a number of criteria. In the era of Web 2.0, the classical argument will be that the collective wisdom of crowds through bookmarking gives a good enough or even better quality measure of content quality. This however assumes that people in your industry are active users of social bookmarking. In my industry (energy), they aren’t.
In your industry, social bookmarking may be more popular, but there are more than 150 bookmarking tools out there. Only the main ones are included in the PostRank algorithm.
And while I’m a strong believer of harvesting collective wisdom, social media sometimes fail spectacularly. If you need an example, just search for the 10 most popular stories on energy in Digg and show this list to any energy professional.
Another issue is that AideRSS penalises the most recent posts, which necessarily will have fewer comments and bookmarks. To find new updates is the main reason why you use an RSS reader, and exactly these updates will tend to be filtered out.
So when will AideRSS help? If you’re overwhelmed by following a large number of RSS feeds, which happen to be deeply in the mainstream of social media marketing (digg, del.icio.us, technorati), AideRSS may be a tool for you.
In business marketing, its relevance may be limited.
social media
In business marketing I think it might make sense to use aideRSS to check the interaction on certain blogs whenever you’re considering outreach to them. It doesn’t help much on influence, but interaction is also a good indicator for blogger outreach programs. I’ll be testing with it this way as well.
- Kris
Although I see and appreciate where they are coming from, I’m afraid there is an omission in the thinking here.
As Kris points out, this can be an excellent tool to decide on outreach programs and other situations where the popularity of a blog is relevant. However, popularity does not equal relevance, particularly in a field still seeing so much development as blogging.
A lot of new business bloggers are coming to the field still, and the fact that at the beginning they don’t have a large readership yet doesn’t mean they might not have great content.
Let’s just say, I’m a little bit worried that this is another service that reinforces the dictatorship of the popular, such as Digg. And of course, running a blog that is built on the premise that some human mediation is necessary to find the best and most relevant posts, I feel threatened :)
P.S. I know it’s early days, but testing the service it manages to completely miss out on the most important and relevant posts on our blog, while giving other, really less poignant posts perfect 10’s.
@Kris - I look forward to learning about your further experiences with AideRSS
@Stefan - Junta42 makes also a good attempt to combine automated tools with moderator intervention.
I also sympathise with your comment of the blogosphere’s tendency to zoom further in a selected few of established blogs that are already popular. I’m experimenting with a marketing blog carnival, and surprised how well it works - I’ve learned already about many marketing blogs flying below radar.