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Artwork by Nicolas Lampert
With all the casual voyeurism blossoming throughout the webscape on any given day, I crave for an application that aggregates the feed readers of my favorite friends. It’s simply not enough for them to recommend sites, pics, news and vids via social bookmarking tools or write stimulating and inspired blog articles chockablock with links. I want more. I want to see their sources; I want a glimpse into how they prioritize their information, what sites draw the most content fodder; I want to know how people make their web experience work for them.
However, since the dawn of journalism, the revealing of sources is probably not in the best interest of the writer looking to be the first to break a story. Perhaps the closest we can get to peeping our best friends Bookmark folder, besides taking their laptop when they are not looking, is to check out what’s hot in RSS Feed land. There are two sites great for culling content people are sharing: RSSmeme and ReadBurner.
RSSmeme was launched in February of this year. It’s a service that profiles the activities of Google Reader users by tracking and aggregating shared Google Reader fees. Unlike previous sites of this nature, RSSmeme allows users to optimize search functions to filter stories according to customized specifications. Another great feature is the “Explore” feature, allowing users to check out “similar stories” or “read even more of this story.”
ReadBurner approaches social news similar to a social bookmarking site, aggregating the stories with the most shares in Google RSS Reader and placing them at the top of the list. Commentary items also get linked in and the site allows user access to their Google Reader feed from within the site. Again, this is another place to source out what’s hip on the feed circuit.
Of course, there are several other methods people use for reading feeds and subsequently more ways to syndicate the information. The key is to make your web experience work for you and to utilize technology to serve your end goal be they as a writer looking for story fodder, a breaking-news content spinner or simply a junky for what’s popular.
So tell me, how do you make the web work for you?
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