“Things I Like” is a new quickie column to be published on a frequency that will charitably described as irregular, based on, you guessed it, things I like.  You could say it is a kind of “review” type post, if you want.

That being said and out of the way, its funny what you find when you’re dredging through your web analytics.  The other day, someone pinged me through a service called AideRSS, so I checked it out.  Its kind of interesting, and the first “Thing” I’d like to write about for “Things I Like”.

AideRSS is a feed reader that tries to make sense out out your feeds.  It basically sorts them out according to a “popularity” index, called “PostRank” that is based on a few variables, but they include things like number of diggs, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and the number of comments it has.  The exact weighting of said variables, and the total number of said variables, aren’t quite available for public consumption, but you get the idea.

Having this algorithm is kind of interesting, because it can sort all of your posts in all of your feeds according to this PostRank, which, incidentally, gives each post a score out of 10.0.  You can generate a list of the best feeds, the best posts, or what have you.

The problem with AideRSS, however, is that because PostRank is directly related to popularity, what you will find is that it disproportionately weights really popular blogs or news sites against those that aren’t intrinsically popular.  This is because irrespective of how “good” any one post is on, say, LifeHacker, because it is a generally popular site, it will get more inbound links, more comments, more Digg, and more bookmarks than another blog, all things being equal.

The real chestnut that I’m trying to describe is that just because something isn’t popular doesn’t mean its not good.  Or, just because something *is* popular, doesn’t mean it *is* good.

What would make a tool like AideRSS even better is having a way of comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.  Amongst sites with a certain traffic level, for example, *this* is what the best posts are.  Without having such an arrangement, trying to filter posts becomes an interesting, albeit it, elitest, exercise.

In general, I am all for putting information in appropriate *context*, and I am on the “future of the interwebs is making sense of information overload” bandwagon.  AideRSS is an interesting tool that will help you tame your feeds, but I think there are a few things it can do to make it even better.

[Another thing I like?  Its Canadian. :) ]