Have we got any idea of what the amount of hits on Feedbrokers (like NewsGator, Bloglines, PubSub, IceRocket, Feedster, and Technorati;) really mean? Robert Scoble started comparing ' link hits' on this earlier this month.

Does a high ‘hit count’ on a keyword really is related to how hot a particular subject is?

Well at ZDNet they wrote this article titled 'Setting Scoble's record on Technorati straight '. It's about the troubles with 'doubles' in the 'Feed Search Results' from Technorati and Bloglines. Thins is a real interesting story!

But say that in the near future these numbers are going to be 99% correct, the amount of results on links that have been found are no exact science about how many people are linking or reading these feeds, right?
We need a read count, a human rating and other thing like that..
Or am i missing something here?

I once published 16 feeds on Bloglines, but I haven’t edited this list in 8 months or so, and I have only looked at then a couple of times. One of those feeds could have a post on a specific keywords or phrase, but maybe nobody is reading this feed.

What does it mean when in one of your OPML lists (at a feedbroker), there is a post using a specific keyword or phrase? This OPML list could be a snapshot from a list you published a year ago!  This is an old snapshot of what you did read a year ago…. Maybe you changed to another aggregator and deleted half of your feeds and maybe you added another 50….   

How are we going to measure the 'freshness' of a published OPML list?Is there a date field in OPML for this purpose? Does it hold the publication date of a OPML file? I won't be surprised if there is such a thing...

But what does this mean for the result of those feedbrokers?

Probably I’m forgetting something here, but….
Shouldn’t we have a categorisation of the results based on the amount of people who added the feed that has the result? And shouldn’t we categorize this by how long ago this OPML list was updated? Or even better.. How many people opened a particular post related to your search…

If this information is not added by all the feed brokers, we will never have a good feeling about ‘how hot’ a particular subject is…

I wrote the following post today on the OpenBC Forum "Corporate Blogs and RSS" .

>>Dave Winer ( Friday, November 19, 2004)
>>RSS is not email. Don't sort them out into little boxes that you have to go to, make them >>flow to you, in a river, unsorted. Your time is what's valuable, there's no value to the items >>you didn't read. If it's important it'll pop up again.

>Alex de Jong wrote: (20/11/20040)
> how do you read your rss feeds ( I like 'em served raw on a plate;) )

Well, this used to be true for me. But when in March this year (2005) I got around 400+ feeds and the 'information river’ just became to big to swim across every day. I would like to share the way how I managed this problem…

I used Sharpreader as my one and only RSS reader. This reader does nice ‘Outlook 2003 like pop-ups’ when items are published, but with 400 feeds this was just too much…
I saved my OPML file with all my feeds and I divided it in three new OPML files.

The first OPML only had all newsfeeds (like BCC news, Dutch news sites and Movie guides)  and the blogfeeds I read most (like Adam Curry, Dave Winer, Scoble, etc.). I imported this OPML file in Sharpreader. My Sharpreader is always on (except when I give presentations with my notebook;). . I like this because I see the ‘information flow’ almost in real time.
This are around 35 feeds that are auto-refreshed every 15 minutes.

The second OPML had all technical feeds and are more related to my job (in IT).
This OPML has around 75% of all my feeds (around 300). This feeds are most about particular products  and technologies. I put all these feeds in RSS Demon and I start up this RSS client once or twice a week, to look what’s happening in the ‘technology and work related scope’.  I also use this client to search for keywords (and use it like an online knowledgebase).

The last OPML file had al the feeds that didn’t fit the first two categories. Most of them are about my hobbies, culture, events and local info and feeds of friends that are blogging.
I put this OPML on Bloglines and I read the feeds when I have some free time. This is mostly in the weekends, like on a Sunday…

So.. Is Dave Winer is right? In a way he is. The information that comes from RSS Feeds should flow thru your desktop (as a river) and the need to categorisation is not the same as with e-mail. But you NEED to divide the RSS streams in ‘multiple rivers of information’ based on your ‘state of mind’, (Instant Messaging) Status or day/time combination. It would be nice to build this within RSS Aggregators. Examples of categories should be ‘always on’, ‘work mode’,  ‘home mode’ and ‘hobby mode’.

What do you think about using Personal Status information in RSS Aggregators?