SCRUB A DUB:

Feedscrub is like a spam filter for your RSS feeds (Jay Hathaway, Feb 6th 2009, Download Squad)

Just because you subscribe to an RSS feed doesn't mean you want to read every single thing in that feed. What if you read Download Squad just for Brad Linder's posts, or you're only interested in posts about Google? FeedScrub might be what you're looking for. It lets you vote each of your RSS articles up or down, training it to only display the stuff you care about. You then subscribe to the scrubbed feed in your reader, and you're good to go.

Where FeedScrub gets things right is at the bottom of each item in the scrubbed feed, where they've put in buttons so you can train FeedScrub directly from your reader.

A few years ago we came back from a five day Disney trip and I had 600 e-mails in my inbox. That was back in the day when I still acquired all the articles we blog about via newsletters. That number was just overwhelming and made me realize how much mail I was getting every day, so I've made a conscious effort to put everything I can into RSS feeds instead.

If you've not given them a try yet, Google Reader is a nice basic one and while it's frustrating that you can't do more things like pause feeds or make the feed smarter--the way you can with junk filters in G Mail--you basically get one page that aggregates news feeds from any and every newspaper, magazine, blog, etc. that you might want to read. But, here's an example of what G Reader won't do: if you subscribe to the Arts feed at The New Yorker, it will deliver all the Goings On Around Town stuff that's only useful if you live in the city and you can't separate that out from the reviews. So I just subscribed to Feed Scrub and it let me ditch the one and keep the other.

I have 5 invites so if you want to give it a try let me know,.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2009 11:48 AM