newsstand PostRank assigns a numeric value to articles, posts and pages based on the number of social engagement events that content has undergone: the higher the number, the better.

You can use instant, in-browser technology to judge and filter content on its value right now.

Without PostRank

When you subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds, your river of news can be a floodstream of trivia, nonsense, repetition and cr stuff you dont have time for.

I follow close to 1000 people in Google Reader who manually curate news for me and deliver it to my Google Reader inbox.

Thats already better as they pick relevant items from their streams and share it but its still a sea of information.

It looks like this:

Google Reader People You Follow

Because I follow a bunch of people, an added filter is when multiple people share something:

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Still, a poor mans filter.

With PostRank: The Authoritative Vox Populi Filter

Then what you do is add the PostRank Google Reader extension.

And heres what that looks like:

Google Reader Postrank view

Where it gets really interesting from the point of view of time-vs-value is that you can have the extension filter your entries by dimming posts below a specific threshold.

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Google Reader Postrank filter

As you see, it becomes very easy to spot high value items.

Just by looking at this smaller resized view of 23 news items you immediately see what to read.

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My Three Filters

Filter #1: the people. Handpicked news items, shared based on value.

Filter #2: multiple shares. More than one person shares it.

Filter #3: engagement. When the content resonates with people.

Filter information through human curation, then filter it by curation confirmation " vox populi squared.

Suggested Uses

  • Speed through your RSS feeds by zooming in on high engagement articles
  • Join the hottest conversations
  • Find items to share with your readers, fans, followers or friends that you know are good
  • See what worked; replicate, innovate " dont duplicate
  • Gauge your own efforts; how engaging is your writing?

How do you use PostRank?

About the Author: Ruud Hein

I love helping to make web sites make it. From the ground up if needed. CSS challenges, server-side scripting, user and device friendly JavaScript tricks search engines have no problems with. Tracking how the sites perform and then figuring out how to make that performance and the tracking better. I'm passionate about information. No matter how often I trim my feeds in my feed readers (yes, I use more than one), I always have a couple of hundred in there covering topics ranging from design to usability, from SEO to SEM, from life hacks to productivity blogs, from.... Well, you get the idea, I guess. Knowledge and information management is close to my heart. Has to be with the amount of information I track. My "trusted system" is usually in flux but always at hand and fully searchable. My paid passion job at Search Engine People sees me applying my passions and knowledge to a wide array of problems, ones I usually experience as challenges. It's good to have you here: pleased to meet you!