Feedgrowth

R-S-S-P-E-C-T Monitor RSS feed performance and popularity with AideRSS

Posted by tom klein August 4, 2008 at 9:34 am

You can easily track the performance of your website or blog through a number of web analytics tools. But, for the crowd that receives your content through an RSS feed, it’s a bit of a guessing game.

That’s where AideRSS comes into play. AideRSS helps filter and rank feeds based on user preferences and settings. It was developed for the overwhelmed RSS reader, who pulls content from numerous news sources and blogs but doesn’t have time to weed through it all. The standout feature of this product is the PostRank scoring system, which ranks articles on their relevance and reaction in the blogosphere. It’s the engine that drives AideRSS and also a great tool for measuring readership levels and general buzz factor.

To get started, enter your site’s feed URL in the AideRSS search bar. We use and have covered Feedburner RSS system, so our URL appears like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedgrowth Immediately, we see the PostRank for individual articles and the number of conversations taking place through feed growth! comments, Digg, and del.icio.us. The site also breaks down your entire content library and assigns the Top 20, then the “Best”, “Great”, and “Good Posts”.

AideRSS is a free and easy tool for gauging your site’s RSS feed performance. You may not know your RSS audience, but at least their reading habits aren’t such a mystery anymore.

Prefer to see the big picture? The BlogTrends Line monitors a feed's performance over time, enabling users to track the consistency and quality of their RSS content.

PostRank is merely a tool in the AideRSS arsenal for helping organize your personal RSS feeds. By re-purposing PostRank, we are able to monitor the popularity and conversations of a particular feed. With thousands of web applications and services coming out each year, the key is seeing beyond a tool's intended use and making it really work for you.

Do you filter your feeds?

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One Comment on “Monitor RSS feed performance and popularity with AideRSS”

Hi Tom -- thanks for the write-up! (Your post title is my favourite riff on RSS to date... should get that on t-shirts...) :) For those who don't want to check out feeds one at a time on our site, the Google Reader extension brings all the PostRank functionality to users' existing feeds. And allows Feed-based ranking (comparing items against a site's own past history), as well as Thematic ranking (comparing items in a folder from all sources against each other's performance). (Users can, of course, filter their feeds at our site and subscribe to them in their readers, and can do OPML imports/exports from our site.) One other tech morsel for tracking performance over time is via the widget -- a good way to get an idea of what a site's best content (by audience engagement) has been, and how far apart in time that content has appeared. :) Re. the "secret sauce", that's exactly what we're aiming for with the release of the PostRank API. PS. Love your site template!
Melanie Baker posted on 5/ 08 at 1:00 pm