I’ve often thought that one of the major drawbacks for RSS feed adoption within the mainstream is that fact that even for us old-timers in the biz the flood of RSS feeds we read everyday can be daunting enough so imagine how it must be for people just new to RSS. Given that some web news sites can publish anywhere up to 40 or more posts in a day it doesn’t take long to run screaming for the hill. Lucky for them that my good buddy Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins happened to run across a new web service called Feedscrub.
According to Mark the way this works is that you take you high volume feeds, plug them into Feedscrub’s system which will give you a new RSS feed to replace the high volume one with. Apparently it will take a few days for their system to learn by you telling it what items in the feed you read and which you don’t. After a while it builds up a profile based on scanning the words in the posts that you have picked and will provide posts along those patterns.
Unfortunately Feedscrub is in closed testing and only allows the management of 3 feeds so this won’t be really useful to people dealing with hundreds of feeds. Hopefully as they progress with their testing and building out to a public release they will increase the number of feeds they handle. Here’s an interesting thought though considering that we are moving into a new web economy of real business plans – maybe they’ll have a pay plan for more feeds handled.
For those of you who might want to give Feedscrub a try Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins has scored about 500 invites. All you have to do is head over to their site and use the invite code of “rizzn” to get in and check it out.
