Innovative Technology Weblog

Now something completely different. Do you remember Monty Python  with their and "Now something completely different"? Why should you? Because this post is about something completely different than the normal Management of Infrastructure stuff I’m blogging on.

A couple days ago I got into a discussion about RSS filtering with Sander Getz. This because he got frustrated about 80% of the feeds he was reading were shouting to get the betas for Vista and/or Office 2007. So he suggested some RSS filtering would be nice.

The ultimate RSS filter in my opinion would be a filter that has:

• Adaptive Filtering (a kind like Bayesian spam filtering works)
• Flag posts covering the same subject (like Vista, Word 2007, etc.) or
• Place all post with the same subject in a Folder

Adaptive Filtering (to me) explained:
For each posts that arrives the words from the body of the post are compared with the words found in other posts. If there is a match of a word (exclusion of common words) a flag (counter)  is posted and the higher the number of flags (counts) the higher the possibility it’s about the same subject. And the more matched words found the higher the possibility of a post match.

But would this work? I tested filtering on words in Outlook because I’m using IntraVnews as RSS Reader in Outlook, I created an Outlook Rule that flagged all post with "2007" in the subject. That worked, but this is far from an automated RSS Filtering ;-(
I looked for RSS filtering options on the Internet and found FeedRinse. Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in. It’s like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions. I signed up for it and giving it a try. But it still does not do what I would like to have. I would like to have a flag or something if the feed I am getting is having say five or more the same important words in the subject or body. Like ‘vista’, ‘beta’, ‘download’, ‘office 2007′, ‘Microsoft’.

Does anybody has an idea how to solve this "problem"?

Regards,
Stefan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 10:51 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.