First look at AideRSS, the low information diet aid

I came to know about AideRSS through Slaw. It’s a sleek new web application out of Waterloo that’s going to make my first pass of RSS reading more efficient and keep my favourite reader too. Its secret sauce is PostRank.

It’s similar to PageRank in that it uses links as signifiers of importance. Unlike PageRank, it’s keenly aware of social bookmarking sites. It weighs votes in reddit, digg, del.icio.us and shows you them in next to each link in the GUI. The slides show that they use many other sites as well. Once all this data is collected, tasted, and rated each post is given a score up to 10.0. Each site has a running line graph showing postrank over time next to its name.

It’s like they’ve created a personal memetracker, allowing you to pick the pool it draws from and let you sort based upon how hot the story is.

The work in progress interface is being shown off at the screencasts section of their blog. If you’re not a big fan, that’s fine, you can subscribe to filtered and postranked feeds in your favourite reader. And yeah, I was careful to take a screenshot that showed no more than their publicly viewable screencast. I’m not under signed NDA but I thought it’d be considerate.

StartupNorth has a longer and more detailed review. I have a small wishlist, but I’ll hold off on my comments until they code freeze before opening.