None of us will ever be able to read all the articles and blog posts we’d like to, and RSS feeds can be an incredible source of information overload. WebWorkerDaily highlights tools and tricks that can help make RSS more relevant.
We’ve waxed lyrical about Yahoo! Pipes before and how Pipes can create a master feed, fetching all your news feeds and filtering them, but the topic is well worth a revisit.
With a particular emphasis on making the flow of information more manageable and more relevant to you, GigaOm’s collaboration blog WebWorkerDaily singles out Yahoo! Pipes for its robust filtering by various criteria and PostRank, a service that gets the top posts (by “engagement” score) from a particular feed. You can use PostRank and Yahoo! Pipes together to find only the most popular posts from your favourite blogs and then filter them by your keywords.
Two other tricks are mentioned for hacking your RSS feed: reformatting the title of your feed headlines so you know which to click on and use Web APIs to bring in additional data not found in an RSS feed.
These tricks and tips were presented at SXSW Interactive this year by Dawn Foster, and the blog post offers an audio recording of the session as well as presentation slides.
If you have any favourite RSS hacking tips or tools, let’s hear them in the comments.
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