Prioritizing blog reading

[CWuestefeld]

I just finished my couple-of-times-per-year pruning of my blog reading list. You can only read so much, so you’ve got to trim the fat.

I’m fishing for recommendations for a new RSS reader. There is one critical feature that I’ve been unable to find in any reader other than the one I’m using, but its developer has been MIA for 1.5 years, and the world has been evolving and bugs haven’t been fixed.

I have yet to find any other browser besides wTicker that features prioritization of articles, in this case by Bayesian filtering. Its “river of news” is sorted according to what it expects I’ll be most interested in, and it only shows me articles that score at least 70%.  With this, I can subscribe to more blogs that might have interesting content, and only get that content put in front of me when it jives with my reading habits.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a replacement reader for some time. Many RSS readers claim that they’re smart in showing you important posts, but really offer nothing more sophisticated than scanning for watch words that you’ve manually entered, or setting whole channels to be "high-priority" (e.g., Newzie). There's one app under development that had been mentioned here some time back, Particls, at www.particls.com, whose raison d’etre is smart filtering, but it doesn’t offer a normal reader interface, just a ticker-sort of thing.

So I submit to you:

• This seems such an obvious feature, why isn't anyone else doing this?
• How do you "optimize" your blog reading time?
• Is there anything out there that meets my needs?

[tinjaw]

I have only been messing with it for a few days, but AideRSS might help you out. It is a web service that you feed your feeds through and it will rank them by their popularity relative to other postings in that feeds history. You can then take these new RSS feeds and use them with any feed reader. I haven't used it enough to report on how well it works.

AideRSS

[cmpm]

Have you checked out this one and it's plugins?

http://www.snarfware.com/

[CWuestefeld]

Thanks for the suggestions. Of these two:

• Snarfware - this looks like a pretty cool application, but I can't see anywhere on their web site that claims to prioritize articles.
• AideRSS - this looks interesting. Rather than using a Bayesian algorithm based on my own ratings, it looks like it's making suggestions based on popularity amongst all of its users. I have some reservation about this because it probably assumes implicitly that my own particular breed of insanity can be matched by any broad popularity contest.

So I think that AideRSS isn't exactly what I'm looking for, but definitely worth keeping on my short list.