Since its launch, AideRSS has aimed to leverage social tools to help determine a publisher's most popular content, through analysis of individual posts and their related activity, including Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, links in Google, and total comments. RSS advocates suffering from information overload have even turned to AideRSS to act as an intelligent filter, providing them the best stream, rather than the default firehose. With today's new announcements, along with a rebranding as PostRank that saw the launch of a new Web site and look, the service has added tags, keyword filtering, and other tools that will get users to the data they are seeking quickly.(See from December 2007: AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best)
PostRank Shows Posts With Audience Engagement Have Higher Score
The first major enhancement to the new PostRank is keyword filtering. As Ilya Grigorik wrote, users have asked for the ability to customize and filter any RSS feed with specific keywords. For example, you could get all posts from The Unofficial Apple Weblog that mention iPhone, or posts from Matt Cutts that mention SEO.
I Tagged TUAW as iPhone and Filtered for Only iPhone News
You can also now tag feeds you import into PostRank, helping to build out what the team calls "custom content channels" based on those tags and keywords. All feeds tagged with BlackBerry would be in the BlackBerry channel, etc.
Most interesting to developers may be the introduction of full API access. According to Grigorik, all operations possible on the new postrank.com site are accessible by API, making it easy to utilize the filtering capabilities seen in their service on other applications.
As a blogger, the new PostRank offers better ways to see if specific posts do better with readers and the social services based on keywords. As a consumer, you can now read fewer feed items and still be sure you don't miss those that are most interesting to you. You can find PostRank at http://www.postrank.com. Of course, going to the old AideRSS.com will push you there as well...