blog: Make this product: Filtered RSS Feeds

Posted on 13 Jun 2008 under with tags: blog

I love RSS feeds. They have totally changed the way I do things. I used to have tons of bookmarks and visit a huge bunch of sites everyday and it took up so much time. With RSS, I have it all centralized and I get content from all my sites with ease.

As my feeds have grown, I went from using news aggreagators like Digg, Google News, Reddit, and so on t get down to specific blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, Signal vs. Noise, and so on. I subscribe to over 70 blogs now.

One problem with this is, that I still trudge through a lot of unwanted content. I will use Mashable in this example. I subcribe to Mashable and love it, but they constantly promote and announce new events across the country.

Unfortunately for me, I simply can’t go to these as I am not anywhere near the proposed locations. I wish I simply didn’t get these in my feed as all they do is make me a sad panda for not being able to attend.

The solution? Allow me to have some form of middleware, that will read through my feeds and simply dump anything that matches specific filters (Similar to what you would do for email setup).

Push all my filtered stuff into a hidden category that I could check up if I really wanted to, but most of the time I wont. A good, but not quite there yet example of this is what FriendFeed does. They allow me to hide entries based on a few specifications and then they show a “Hidden entries” link on the bottom of each page. I rarely check the hidden entries as I know what’s there is stuff I really don’t care for.

So basically, that is my proposal. Create something like this that I could plug right into Google Reader without slowing me down and I, and I’m sure others will be very happy.

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