Two recurring themes have shown up in my development of RSS Bandit and usage of news aggregators in general

1. There are feeds I'm susbscribed to whose content I never end up reading because there is too much content (e.g. Weblogs @ ASP.NET) thus missing the good stuff.

2. There is no easy way to find content that I'd find interesting.

I've noticed more and more people complaining about the information overload that comes with being subscribed to too many feeds and wanting some way to sift through the information. I spoke to someone at work yesterday who said he'd stopped using his aggregator to subscribe to individual feeds but instead just subscribed to RSS feeds of search results on Feedster. Similarly some RSS Bandit users subscribe to a lot of feeds and just use Search Folders to sift through them. Both approaches are slight variations of the same thing. The first person would rather read all information in blogs about a certain topic or keyword while the other would like to read all information about a certain topic or keyword from a select list of feeds.

The goal of RSS Bandit is to encourage both approaches. For the former we provide functionality for viewing Feedster [and other search engines that return RSS feeds] search results in the same manner one would view an RSS feed. In the next version we will provide the functionality to directly subscribe to such search results in two clicks (type search term in address bar, click the search button, results come back as an RSS feed, click subscribe to search results). The last piece is currently missing from RSS Bandit but will be in the next version. For the latter scenario where users subscribe to lots of feeds but only read the ones that match the searches in particular search folders I am considering improving the search capabilities by supporting query-like functionality. Currently you can create a Search Folder that shows all items that match a particular key word or key phrase. However sometimes you want to perform searches over multiple terms (e.g. “Microsoft AND Longhorn”) or fine tune certain searches by ignoring posts that may coincidentally match your keyword but are not of interest (e.g. “Java -coffee -indonesia”).

As for finding new interesting content, RSS Bandit already provides a way to search for feeds by keyword on Syndic8 but there is a bunch more that can be done. There are a bunch of other ideas I have about enabling users to manage the deluge of feeds on the Web and finding new interesting content. Including

1. Only show posts that have been linked to by other feeds you are subscribed to. This would work for news sites like Slashdot or high traffic feeds like Blogs @ MSDN.

2. Add a way to integrate with Technorati's Interesting Blogs and Interesting Newcomers lists whenever they are implemented.  

3. Only show posts that have a certain threshold of incoming links (e.g. 5 or more) as measured by Technorati. This may be infeasible due to causing high load on Technorati.

I'm supposed to be hanging out with Lili Cheng in the next couple of days, I wonder what she'll think of some of these ideas and perhaps she can set me on the right path.