But the issue here isn’t so much with RSS. RSS is just a data format
after all. The problem is that the current generation of feed readers
merely reformat RSS for display. They don’t do anything else, no
prioritization, no filtering, no help dealing with the flood of
information.
Greg’s company Findory offers a personalized news page that learns from the articles you choose to read. And you can import Bloglines feed subscriptions into a Favorites page that I guess learns from how you read those. I’m not sure whether the main page and favorites page work together to learn what sort of articles would suit you best. It’s a good idea, in theory. I’ll have to try it out for a while to see if it gets any good at figuring me out.
My first stop at Findory was not encouraging, but such a service needs to be used over time to show whether it’s useful or not. The main news page carried not one single article I’m interested in and it had a couple that downright turned me off, like “Soldiers in Iraq and sex” in the Findory Blogs Top Stories and “Lessons From Women Who Lost Half Their Body Weight” in the news section. Blech. Loading my Bloglines subscriptions resulted in a “Top Stories from My Favorites” page heavily weighted towards tech news rather than mom blog articles, I suppose because the tech blogs I read are more heavily trafficked than the mom blogs. But I care equally as much or more about the mom blogs.
Techblog recommends SearchFox, a feed reader that uses machine learning to aggregate and personalize feeds. It’s in beta, so you either need to be invited to join or you need to make an email request for an account. I’ve requested an account; we’ll see if my yahoo.com email account makes me too unhip to test it out.
Maybe the findory approach or SearchFox will meet my needs better than BlogLines does. While I’m checking those out, I’m going to adjust my feed reading approach in Bloglines using some ideas I found on Les Orchard’s blog.
