I just thought I would post a response to Mossy Blog's “RSS Aggregators are a waste of time” post.
Basically, the theme is that due to the sheer amount of content posted to blogs within the Adobe community, shared with the fact that posters are not always strict about what they post and what categories they share it under, that the usefulness of RSS Aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, MXNA and FullAsAGoog diminishes.
Well, as the author of one of these aggregators I can see exactly where he is coming from (as well as everyone else in the discussion that was originally on the CFAUSSIE list). So, I thought I would jot down a note describing the features that Feed-Squirrel.com has in place to mitigate these problems. All of these features have been in place since launch or soon after, and the feedback I have received from users has helped develop them significantly. So, here we go:
1) Smart Categories - All of the categories within Feed-Squirrel.com (from the links on the left) should be considered smart, i.e they parse the content for keywords and topics and then decide what category the post should go in. Some posts go in more than one category because of this, some don't go in any, but the net effect is that every thing you see in, say, the CF category, has some sort of relevance to CF.
2) Top Items - Whilst the Digg model is very nice, I felt it was too much for feed-squirrel, as I realised people generally vote for items simply by reading the preview text and then clicking the item to take a look at the whole post. Combining this with item age and a couple of other parameters, Feed-squirrel shows you, all the time, the most popular items over the last 24 hours across the entire dataset.
3) Custom Categories - So, if the last two features still don't filter out enough of the rubbish for you, and you know of a few posters that you trust, you can create a “Custom Category”. You can create as many of these as you like, and include in them only the feeds that you find are of interest. So, for instance, you think Ray Camden and Sean Corfield always say the right things? Then create a custom category for them and filter out everyone else.
As with everything else on feed-squirrel at the moment, none of these features require any sort of registration or login and can be used straight away.
As always though, I am sure that these features do not tick the boxes for every user out there, and never will, but if you think you have an idea which might help this, let me know and I'll see what we can do…
