I've been slowly and methodically making my way through the torrent of new RSS aggregation and ranking startups that have sprung forth in the last several weeks. Most (if not all) of them were discovered first by Louis Gray. We covered the first of the series of discoveries in ReadBurner. We'll likely be coming back to that one again soon, as a number of new improvements have come to the system since we last talked about them, but today we're going to focus on a tool with very similar functionality: RSSMeme.
Like ReadBurner, the core of RSSMeme's functionality lays in the Google Reader Shared Items function. What the system does is subscribe to a broad list of folks with Google Reader-powered linkblogs, and aggregate the results into a toplist of sorts. You might be asking yourself how RSSMeme is different from ReadBurner. As it says on the site FAQ: "Fundamentally it isn't. But both of us have things that the other doesn't and competition is good."
Am I Experiencing Deja Vu? This Looks Familiar.
It does have a number of features that ReadBurner doesn't, though, and most of them are unique ways to filter the stories that aren't present in ReadBurner. While ReadBurner focuses on making feeds for bubbling up news with share thresholds built in, RSSMeme has a bit more of a focus on semantic filtering, and ego searching.
For instance, you can search for users and stories (that are accompanied RSS feeds of their own), and get an RSS feed and web page of stories published on a specific date (including today). On the ego-search side of things, you can pull up an RSS feed of all the popular items written by you, for example (I personally reccomend this guy). Similarly, you can pull up a page of the popular content from the most awesome blog, evar.
In terms of the system's real useful functionality, the semantic side of things, there is the tag pages, which do a decent job of filtering content by topic. Perhaps more interestingly is the function that groups people together by their topics of interest, as well as a decent start at a memetracker that groups stories together by topic.
Bottom Line It: What Do You Think?
These are all very interesting and unique features. The system seems to be about the level of development that ReadBurner was when we first reviewed that system; that is to say, a little rough around the edges still, but full of promise. There are a number of RSS feeds in here that will shorten the amount of time you spend in your feed reader each day, and with a little bit more work and some more granular control on topics, the topic grouping system could end up being a suitable replacement for popular memetrackers like TechMeme and Blogrunner.