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.

Comments

[Colin Bohanna]

Thanks for this.
FYI- the link for Blastfeed is missing a t in th URL.
http://www.blastfeed.com/

Colin

[Ichi]

If you're trying to handle hundreds of feeds then you need to check out www.threz.com

Its seriously handy

[Steve Rubel]

Fixed the link.

[Whitney McNamara]

Interesting -- I'd like to take a look if you still have invites available. (whitney // absono.us)

One of the reasons that I'm devoted to FeedDemon is that it offers an integrated "watch" functionality that seems like a similar sort of functionality. The way that I consume feeds I have a "bulk" bucket that serves largely as input for the word/phrase watches that I've set up.

I discuss in a little more detail in the post above, but the summary is that some time ago I realized that I don't much read individual feeds much any longer: the feeds are input and I consume a sliced-and-diced aggregate product.

[Ryan Anderson]

I've been looking for a tool like this for a good long time. Thanks, Steve.

[mike]

I'll try this imidaitly

[Ben Pujji]

Thanks for the invite Steve - what a legend. In turn, I've got 25 invites to give away - if you missed out, drop me a line.

[Jordi]

Similar services (that work - I filter feeds in Spanish) are mysyndicaat.com and feeddigest.com

It'd be nice if someone can send me an invitation to try blastfeed. My e-mail is ladrillosybits [@] gmail . com

Many thanks

[Kevin Burton]

Tailrank does the same thing and is probably a bit smarter. We actually only filter through stories that have high rank.

Just click on "My Tail" and start importing a few blogs

[Simon]

Just make sure the "element of surprise" is not taken away by the filter...

http://citizenmediawatch.com/index.php/2006/12/02/the-element-of-surprise-being-filtered-away/

[Ewan McIntosh]

If there are any invites left I'd love one!

[feedbite.com]

This one has been around for over a year.