Sorting It Out with Activity and AideRSS

When it comes to sorting my feeds, I generally am an old-school kind of guy. Since RSS brings me the newest information on websites, I tend to keep my sort order on Newest. Recently, NewsGator added two new ways to sort posts in a feed, so I decided to do a little research and find out more about how they worked.

You might have noticed the changes yourself if you’re using NewsGator Online. If you go to Sort Order at the top right of any list of posts, you’ll see that you can list them not only by Newest and Oldest, but now by Activity and AideRSS PostRank.

What’s the difference? I picked a popular, prolific feed to see how changing the sort order would work. It was easy to choose Boing Boing, “a directory of wonderful things” collected by author Cory Doctorow and a small circle of friends fascinated by the Internet. I have 89 feeds unread.

When I sort by Newest, the first post is, of course, the most recent. It’s about Wesabe, a company whose goal is help people spend money more intelligently, followed by a video of a resort in Disneyland that has sat idle, like a ruin, for several years. Third up is a post that links to author Neil Gaiman’s piece on the Harry Potter copyright lawsuit.

Sorting by Activity lists posts according to their interaction inside NewsGator. When a NewsGator user clips, emails or tags a post, it gives that post more authority and it rises in the mix. This lets me see quickly which posts are grabbing other users’ attention. (This is what we call “attention streams.”) The first Boing Boing post under Activity is one from Tuesday about people who enjoy photoshopped images of pin-ups being squished by elephant trunks. The second looks at books that changed the lives of famous scientists, followed by a post with photos of luxury hotels that were never finished and are rotting in the desert.

This offers a nice contrast to the Newest sort. With 89 posts, I know I’m not going to be interested in all of them, and this puts posts that other people find most interesting in the forefront. And if I am a publisher of a feed, Activity sort offers instant feedback on which posts are getting the most attention (and which ones aren’t) – within NewsGator. If I'm in a hurry and want to see only posts other people like, this is a good choice.

When I switch to AideRSS PostRank, I get a third way to sort my feeds. NewsGator recently partnered with AideRSS, which scores, filters and tracks the performance of any RSS feed across the Web. According to this sort option, the top posts include a story of a man detained for taking photos in an English town’s pedestrian area, a 2001 profile of former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers and one about how gun owners are happier than the rest of us.

So Activity sort judges how users within NewsGator are ranking posts, and AideRSS PageRank shows how users on the Web interact with content. The AideRSS PageRank only ranks the top 1000 feeds within the NewsGator system, so you won’t see activity on every feed.
For more information about attention streams, see this post by NewsGator’s Jeff Nolan, while Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb explains AideRSS in more detail.