Blastfeed Filters Your Feeds

Once you've been bitten by the RSS bug, it's hard to turn back. However, at the same time you're likely to fall prey to it's biggest disadvantage - information overload. It's very easy once you get started to gorge on feeds. Before you know it, you can have hundreds of them. This is giving rise to new kinds of utilities that manage your feeds for you.

One new one that caught my eye is Blastfeed. The company, based in France, can take one or more RSS feeds or an OPML file and filter them based on certain keywords. This is a really handy utility. Think about it. Let's say you've identified the 100 or 200 most influential feeds (note I said feeds, not blogs) that cover your industry. You can import these into Blastfeed and get alerts via email, IM or RSS when certain terms are mentioned, e.g. a client or a competitor.

Blastfeed isn't going to get me to unsubscribe to my favorite feeds. However, what it will do is give me a way to track more closely what's being said within them. I have added a couple of these feeds to my browser and my personalized start page for quick and easy monitoring. Right now the site is in a private beta, but I have five 100 invites (thanks guys!) to give away first come, first serve to folks who email me.

This is only the beginning. Filtering services are going to get a lot smarter and probably will be integrated into existing RSS platforms. It's all going to get to a point where the reader knows which feed items you're more likely to read first and will prioritize your lists accordingly. In the meantime, Blastfeed is a winner if you're looking to augment how you read feeds.