aideRSS: PageRank for your blog

Here’s another way to see what’s popular. aideRSS is a new service which generates a rank for each of your posts – PostRank. It then uses this information to provide filtered RSS feeds for good, great, best and top posts. These filtered feeds then allow you to filter out the drivel from someone’s site.

My posts all rank exactly the same at the moment which isn’t very helpful. I suspect that is because I’ve not written anything interesting recently; it only shows my last 10 posts. If you want to have a look it’s all here: http://www.aiderss.com/all/oak-grove.typepad.com

I’m a bit puzzled by the whole concept really, because it feels a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy. The PostRank seems to be using things like the number of comments on a particular post. If lots of people only subscribe to the “best” posts then those posts are going to stay the “best” posts because they are the only ones being commented on and the other non-“best” posts aren’t going to get a look in. They must be reckoning on enough people subscribing to the full feed that the numbers aren’t completely skewed.

The other interesting thing is that they are running it on Amazon’s EC2. So you could says that it’s a virtual start-up because they don’t even have their own infrastructure to look after.