A few weeks ago I had a chat with Robert Rebholz about folksonomies, RSS and information overload. It was a rather fun discussion and he let me know about a tool he'd built called the OPML-o-mater. The way the tool works is described below,
The OPML-o-mater delivers a personalized list of RSS feeds in an xml format called OPML. OPML files can be imported by any competent RSS Reader/Aggregator.You want the feeds from the OPML-o-mater because they're known quality feeds -- at least they were when we entered them. Even if you already have all the feeds you need, it might be worth a look to discover if we've one or two you didn't know about.In general it works this way: We've tagged the feeds. You select the tags that describe your interests The OPML-o-mater finds and displays feeds associated with the tags you've selected You pick the feeds you want Press the generate OPML button Save the OPML file to your local machine Import it into your feed reader More specifically, we've tagged all the feeds. The first column of the OPML-o-mater lists the tags. You select a single tag from column one that describes an area of interest for you. Column two displays the tags that were also used anytime the tag you selected was used to describe a url (bear in mind that a single feed/url may have many tags associated with it). In column three the feeds associated with the selection made in column one are displayed.
The OPML-o-mater delivers a personalized list of RSS feeds in an xml format called OPML. OPML files can be imported by any competent RSS Reader/Aggregator.You want the feeds from the OPML-o-mater because they're known quality feeds -- at least they were when we entered them. Even if you already have all the feeds you need, it might be worth a look to discover if we've one or two you didn't know about.In general it works this way:
I think this is a very interesting way to solve the "How Do I Find Interesting Blogs?" problem which plagues users of RSS readers today. I currently am subscribed to 158 feeds in RSS Bandit. Given that there are tens of millions of blogs out there, I am sure that there are literally thousands of blogs I'd love to read if I just knew about them. The tough question for me has been how to find them and then how to integrate that process into RSS Bandit in an automated way.
What would be cool would be for the OPML-o-mater to evolve into the equivalent of http://del.icio.us/popular/ for RSS feeds and then for it to expose an API that tools such as RSS Bandit could integrate into part of their user experience. This idea is interesting enough that I wish I had the time and dedicated server resources to build it myself.