Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

PostRank Is Puzzling To Me

Today, AideRSS launched a FireFox extension that adds their PostRank technology to Google Reader. The geek in me says “cool” - using a browser extension to extend a 3rd-party application with more data. But I’m not likely to use it.

No offense to the fine folks at AideRSS, but I’ve never really understood why I would use their technology - so I haven’t. Here’s why:

1. I struggle enough already with the nagging feeling that I might be missing the little nuggets of the conversation in the blog-o-hoods that I hang out in. For example, it’s very difficult for me to unsubscribe from any feed because even though the last 20 posts have been so-so, the next might be gold. Why on earth would I want to intentionally not read posts from feeds that I’ve already determined have value to me?
2. If a feed has only 1 great post for every 10/20/30 good posts, that tells me something about the author(s) and informs my ongoing evaluation of the blog. If I only ever see the great posts, I get a misrepresented view of the author. If the blog-o-sphere were only about content, then a filtering service might be useful to me - but I want to know and understand the people I read and that means taking the good with the great.

If you disagree with me, or your blog-reading habits are just different than mine, please let me know in the comments.