Make Signal From Noise With AideRSS

AideRSS gets some kudos today. Not just for providing a service that helps bloggers determine which of their posts are the most engaging. Not just for building out a Google Reader plugin (plus integration with Newsgator and others) that lets you weed out the less relevant or active posts and cut down the noise to get a better signal from your feed reading experience. And not just for having easy to understand how-to videos on their website to show folks how to use their service. Sure, I’m going to talk about all of those, but I’ll also compliment them on devising a compelling reason for some of the top social media and marketing bloggers to write about their service. More on that in a moment.

AideRSS essentially uses a post ranking system (cleverly named PostRankâ„¢) that measures the number of comments or conversations, bookmarks and even pointers from Twitter for each post, then compares all of the posts on a given blog to give you the cream of the crop. The system separates out the highest scoring posts as best, then a second level of great and a third level of good, along with the “all posts” listing. You can organize and view each category separately or together and even subscribe to a feed of any of the four categories.

What this means is you can not only determine what posts on your own blog are the most engaging, but you can pump RSS feeds from any blog, or group of blogs (they support filtering through your entire OPML file) to instantly weed out the entries that don’t have as much appeal. They’ve even got the aforementioned Google Reader plugin to let you see the AideRSS PostRank of an entry and display by the four levels of engagement right in your reader.

This is not just useful for individuals who subscribe to a lot of feeds, but let’s say you are a business owner or marketing person hoping to participate on a number of blogs in your industry. You’re not quite sure which ones are the most popular and know you don’t have enough time to comment on 30-40 blogs in a given day. By filtering your feeds, or an OPML file of your feeds (available by exporting folders from most feed readers), you can figure out which five or 10 in a given day are widely read enough to bother taking the time for.

In theory.

There are two hiccups to the theory that I have found. Unless I’m mistaken, a post that might have a post rank score of 7.5 (out of 10) on my blog is very different from one that would have a 7.5 on, say, TechCrunch, or another blog that can see 50 comments in the first hour or so of a post going live. Comparing the “great” posts on a small, niche or low-traffic blog to those on high-traffic sites seems an apples-to-oranges (or apples-to-raisins) comparison. My 7.5 may be a great post, but it won’t have nearly the amount of traffic and engagement a 7.5 on TechCrunch would have with an article that achieves the 7.5 based on sheer volume, not just quality of the text.

The lovely folks from AideRSS are welcome to correct me, but there seems no easy algorithmic way to differentiate unless you have access to definitive traffic numbers and active feed subscribers, which are impossible to glean from most websites. (Their engagement factor also doesn’t seem to count RSS subscribers which, while Fred Wilson argues, and correctly so, these numbers are unreliable in determining popularity or engagement, they are still one way of measuring it.)

The second item I noticed about AideRSS that struck me as incomplete was that determining PostRank is dependent upon time. If my list of 10 “Must Read” blogs each have new entries posted tomorrow morning, it will be midday or beyond before a reliable PostRank number hits to tell me how engaging the entries are. If I need to know which one is most compelling to read before my 9 a.m. meeting, I’m just going to have to guess or I’ll pick the one that might have had the most early-riser comments or bookmarks. This may not necessarily be the most engaging post, but it’s certainly a start.

And speaking of time, the Google Reader plugin makes my feed reader sit and spit a bit as it cues the PostRank info. Not a problem, but annoying.

The system also discounts the hidden nugget you’ll find from time-to-time on a blog that isn’t as widely read or popular. There are new ideas emerging from relatively unknown bloggers every day. I like to read those, too. After all, not too long ago (and perhaps arguably still today in some circles) Social Media Explorer was in the, “not sure if I subscribe or not, but the name sounds familiar” category.

In essence, AideRSS’s PostRank system is unreliable for those interested in immediacy in feed reading. The more time a post has to gain traffic, comments, bookmarks and inbound links, the more reliable the number. It’s still a more effective way of measuring a post’s validity than strictly bookmarks or number of comments, but it’s not perfect.

And there are always snags. For instance, if you look at the PostRank results for SocialMediaExplorer.com found here, you’ll see that (at least according to the data I found at 5 p.m. ET on Sunday evening) my Friday post, “Defining A Social Media Marketer,” had eight comments according to their calculations. I checked. It had zero on the blog and none in FriendFeed either. So, I’m not sure where they came up with that. Many of my solid posts with many comments from months past weren’t even on the list. I’m going to assume the data is from the last 30 days or so, but even then the information didn’t appear to be fully accurate.

For the record, I’ve installed the Google Reader filter and am playing with AideRSS regularly now. I like the fact they can help me weed out items I probably don’t need to take the time to read if it’s been a day or so since I’ve checked my feeds. Ultimately it saves time, which is a good thing. They also have a more refined way of determining what a blog’s best posts are, for those interested in that kind of listing or widget. I may install it here soon, just to monitor it for a while.

Certainly, I’d be interested to know what you think of AideRSS. Please let us know in the comments. I’m sure someone from the service will be clarifying a few things I’ve pointed out here, so let them know what you think. They are listening.

And that brings us to a final kudo or two for the service. Not only are they engaging in the social media space with a Twitter account and some friendly banter with people who mention them, but they found a very compelling way to reach out to some of the top social media and marketing bloggers, in my opinion.

AideRSS took the July 2, 2008 rating from Mack Collier’s list of the Top 25 Marketing Blogs he updates weekly on The Viral Garden and measured each for a level of engagement, then re-ranked them (see ranking to the left). In Mack’s defense, he bases the list on the Technorati authority score, which, as I understand it, is the number of unique blogs or websites that link to the blog in question over the last six months. Social Media Explorer most recently came in at No. 22 on that list.

However, according to the engagement numbers run by AideRSS, Social Media Explorer is ranked No. 8. We were the biggest jump from The Viral Garden’s list. See their blog post and the full results here. As engagement fluctuates, the rankings change of course, but the list is a more complete and compelling look at which blogs in the marketing space are capturing the interest and engagement of their audiences.

(Keep in mind AideRSS only looked at the 25 ranked by The Viral Garden for July 2. There are plenty of other marketing blogs out there which may have changed the make-up of the list, including some that perhaps don’t have enough backlinks yet to even make Mack’s consideration set.)

Once they had their results, Melanie Baker, AideRSS’s community manager, reached out to say, “look where you rank now!” As I said in my email response, “Damn you, appealing to my vanity!”

So, it’s a solid way to analyze your own blog, those you may want to target for outreach or to filter out the good stuff from the number of feeds you subscribe to. While not perfect, it’s pretty strong and pretty cool. I certainly recommend digging in and checking it out. Perhaps you’ll find a different way it can help you. If you do, please come back and share with us here.

And, Melanie and the AideRSS team gets an extra “bravo” for a pretty compelling and convincing way to conduct blogger outreach — by giving us something useful that exhibits the power of the product, which is certainly relevant to our audiences. At least one other blogger ranked on this list has said before that if he doesn’t ask for something via email, he considers it spam. I didn’t ask for this. But even if I stayed solid at No. 22, or even dropped to No. 25, it certainly is something of relevant interest to me and (I’m assuming) my audience. Nice job, gang.

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