Two Too Cool Tools To Turn Your Feeds Into Research Gold Mines

AideRSS: Social Engagement Filter For Feeds

AideRSS is an innovative new RSS aggregator / reader that comes with a cool twist. Utilizing their new PostRank scoring system, AideRSS scores blog posts on social engagement.

Social Engagement in this case is measured as a function of creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. Each type of social engagement carries a progressively lower weight based on the difficulty or complexity involved in taking the action. So someone writing a blog post about your blog post is going to have a lot more weight in the scoring system than someone simply clicking though to it from a feed reader.

On top of this the scoring actually takes place in two separate scopes at once. First, feed based, and the second Theme based. Using this dual scoring system means that postrank can rank items from within a single feed as the rate against one another, and then still score individual items from multiple feeds within a topical theme against each other. So depending on how strong the competition is, your best posts will fare differently within the overall scoring for your niche.

All of this is cool enough, but you can also save feeds to your own feed reader built into the AideRSS website. And each feed you save you can set a filter level for. So you can say you want some feeds to show only the best posts, some feeds to show good and better, and still other feeds can show all of their posts.

And then you get a feed for the filtered version of the feeds and can send the filtered versions to your favorite feed reader. If you are like me and Google Reader is you feed reader of choice, you can install a FireFox add on that will embed the filter controls into your reader view. This allows you to change the filter on the fly, and shows you the PostRank of each item in the current view.

BlogRovR Is Ready To Fetch Your Feed Intelligence

BlogRovR is another killer application for really putting your feeds to work. It's another aggregator, and lets you add all of your feeds to it. By the way, both of these tools allow you to import and export feeds in OPML files to add and save them in batch mode.

Unlike other feed aggregators and readers, BlogRovR does not give you a traditional feed reader view pane to read your feeds in. There are a lot of feed readers out there and that's all it was I sure wouldn't be spending the time to write about it.

No, what BlogRovR does is quietly sit in your FireFox Navigation bar while you surf around the net looking for cool new stuff and tasty hidden information to post to your blog and bedazzle your readers. Then when you hit a page that little pooch runs across the web and grabs up all of the referrences made to the page you are on.
Then it pops out an unobtrusive little slide out window to let your see who's talking about it. It's not a big window and it just slides out enough to get your attention. You can keep doing what you're doing, or you can pause to dig up some additions research and opinion from the bloggers you trust.

it's like the dog that runs out and get's your newspaper from the curb for you in the morning, but this dog actually compiles the newspaper from your trusted sources and delivers it whenever there is new news. Every time, on time. And it doesn't poop on the carpet either. Good RovR.

The One Two Punch: The Best Alerts, Where You Need Them, When You Need Them!

So here's a double cool idea. Load a bunch of good feeds from your niches into AideRSS and set up the filters to get the best sampling of posts from each of these feeds. Then export a filtered feed list to an OPML file.

Next upload that filtered OPML list up to BlogRovR and go surfing. Now BlogRovR will let you know when you are on a page that one of your bloggers has talked about, but only for the really good stuff they've had to say about it.

Now that's power researching there. Get extra research and find trackbackable, quotable information from people you know are good without having to go track them down or search them out. BlogRovR already fetched them for you.

Try it out and let me know

Give this method a try and let me know how it works for you! If you have any ideas to improve my method I'd love to read them.

Do you have any really cool RSS tools you use? What are they?