Do you have so many RSS feeds that you have trouble organizing them and putting them in priority? Here is a feature that might help from BlogBridge, my RSS reader. BlogStarz is a way to rate each RSS feed you subscribe to. BlogBridge will provide a recommended rating based on a number of factors and then you can accept or override this rating. Then you can adjust your reader to only take feeds that rate above a certain level. Before I get to BlogStraz in more depth, let me give you a bit of context for those not familiar with BlogBridge.
It is an RSS reader designed for power users but the basic features are also accessible for basic users. BlogBridge allows you to create guides (essentially reading lists of favorite RSS feeds on a topic). This allows you to categorize your RSS feeds and group them into more useful and usable portions. This is something that I recently wrote that del.icio.us needs to do with their tags. So I have guides, subsets of my RSS feeds, on the following topics: blogging, food, knowledge management, web 2.0, collaboration, and innovation. Each guide has my favorite blogs on the topic in a manageable format. If a guide gets to big, I can break it into logical sections through new guides. Building on the topical guide concept, BlogBridge also offers reading lists complied by experts on a topic. You can select any of these reading lists and have them easily imported into your BlogBridge reader as a guide. I created the one on knowledge management.
Now to the BlogStarz. BlogBridge’s recommended rating is displayed above each feed in the form of silver stars. You also see any final ratings that you have selected yourself in the form of gold stars. If you click on a feed for a site, you will get a popup box. If you click on the BlogStarz tab, you get more details on the recommended ratings. They are based on scores on five factors: activity, inbound links, keywords, views, click throughs. Then you can make a final rating, shown, in gold based on this input and your own opinions.
One of the cool features is that you can easily adjust the relative weight of each of these five factors in determining the recommended rating. There is a sliding scale going from 1 to 0 for each. You can then tell BlogBridge to only show feeds above a certain rating. BlogBridge will only uses your own ratings to make this judgment, which is a good decision. The BlogStrarz tab will also show the Technorati inbound links for each feed along with the scores on each of the five factors with their weight also displayed for easy reference. web 2.0
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.