Home Filter Google Reader by Item Popularity With New AideRSS Plug-in

Filter Google Reader by Item Popularity With New AideRSS Plug-in

Overwhelmed with all the content coming through your Google Reader? Want to skim just the top stories from any feed you’re looking at? Canadian RSS filtering service AideRSS today launched a new Firefox plug-in that lays the company’s unique “filter by popularity” features over the top of Google Reader. Limited beta invites are available below.

AideRSS’s “post rank” algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it’s got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn’t playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won’t be able to use it yet. Update: We’re hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of “it’s in private Beta” users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.

Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there’s all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs (“10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things“), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.

AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality – but it’s not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.

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