Most of what I read online I read in RSS feeds.  It's easy to accumulate feeds, too many feeds maybe, but there is no shortage of information in them.  Finding information relevant to my interest is the challenge.

Lately we have seen a number of websites claiming to organize and filter web feeds.  Yahoo Pipes may be the well known option, with sites like Feed Rinse offering flexibility and functionality.  The list is fair, ReadWriteWeb offers a good summary, but in the end, as good as tools like Feed Rinse are, they still require an unacceptable amount of manual manipulation to get them to work.  I have to construct keyword based filters to sift information out of a collection of feeds, which doesn't really help if I don't have a clear understanding of what those keywords should be.

Think of it this way.  Each keyword is a white dot on a black page.  Let's say that keyword is Flyers, as in Philadelphia Flyers hockey.  I set up my filter for Flyers, and all pages with Flyers get through.  But surrounding the keyword, our white dot, is a whole spectrum of gray containing ancillary keywords of associated interest.  Names of Flyers players or coaches, for example, may be in an article not naming the team specifically.  It feels like these filtering tools still put the burden on me to cope with associated information by laboriously constructing filters to accommodate it.

It's a dicey proposition.  Will these RSS filter sites be able to figure out an article on Eric Lindros' may be of interest to me because he once played hockey for a team I like?  We'll have to wait and see, but until then, I'll just skip over what's not relevant.  It's still quicker that way.