What’s ‘Important’ in Your RSS Feeds?
Reading a straight RSS feed, let along a double- or triple-digit number of them, without any filtering is a little like checking email without a spam filter. There’s a lot of stuff you just don’t need to pay any attention to. There are a number of services with different approaches to feed filtering (FeedRinse, AideRSS to name just 2).
Cullect takes a different approach. Rather than automatically removing items from a feed 1, Cullect ranks all the items in the reading list (whether from 1 feed or hundreds) based on their ‘importance’. It’s this ranking, the ‘Important’ tab, that is the default view in any Cullect.com reading list.
What’s ‘Important’?
It’s a special combination of a number of attributes from the item and the feed it came from, including;
- How many people in Cullect have recommended it?
- How many incoming links does the item have?
- How many paying members of Cullect are giving money to that feed?
‘How recently was item was published?’ isn’t even in the top 5 2. This helps solve the problem Mike Keliher identified - where the reverse chronological nature of feed reading buries the story originator.
Importance takes time to identify. Plus, how relevant a given item is to you, is most likely independent of when it was published. So, rather than spend 30 minutes scanning your feeds for anything good - try out Cullect.com’s Important rank - the good stuff is at the top.
1. The ‘hide’ command makes it easy to quickly remove unwanted items.
2. That’s what the ‘Latest’ tab is for.
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2 Responses to “What’s ‘Important’ in Your RSS Feeds?”
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Funny. I never thought I was hinting at something so significant with that little observation about the order of feed-reader items.
I really like this “important” feature. Very cool.
What do you mean by “giving money to that feed”? Is there actually money changing hands between Cullect users and content publishers, or does Cullect just put more weight on things paying users read?
Mike - paying members of Cullect.com have the option of donating 30-50% of their monthly membership fee to a feed of their choosing. Cullect.com will contact the feed publisher and get the money to them via PayPal or something similar.