Webware

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Feed Rinse is a super simple and user-friendly way to tweak RSS feeds before subscribing to them in your favorite reader tool.

With it you can pick which authors or keywords you want to exclude, giving you complete control over what ends up filling your feed reader. For example, on Webware's RSS feed you could very quickly choose to only get posts about Google (which is possible on our main site using tags), or a handful of keywords at the same time.

Hate reading a certain blogger? Choose to block or otherwise filter posts by keyword, title, author, and more with Feed Rinse.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As Martin over at Ghacks points out, you could accomplish a similar feat on Yahoo's Pipes service, although I found Feed Rinse to be dramatically easier to use. It's a lot like programming a smart playlist in iTunes, with simple drop-down menus, instead of Pipes' system which requires you to create programming strings.

One thing worth mentioning is that Feed Rinse is smart enough to know you're going to take your newly created RSS feed elsewhere, and as such has special links that will send your feed out to various reader services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, and others. There's also a bookmarklet that lets you tweak the RSS feed on any site you're on with one click. Both are nice touches that save you time.

Feed Rinse is completely free to use, although you're limited to creating and managing just 500 filters per user account. The service previously had a premium and plus plans, however these disappeared two years ago in place of a unified offering.

(via Ghacks)

Keeping up with multiple RSS feeds can be tough. Yeah it's really simple, but that syndication bit is what always gets me. Google has introduced a fresh way to analyze both when blogs you subscribe to are posting and when (and if) you're actually reading them.

The data is represented with simple colored bars, with the blue being post time and the red as the time you typically get your reading done. You can dig down even deeper and split up the monthly data by the time of day, or day of the week. The results can be startling.

The system does not currently work with groupings of blogs, but on any single feed, clicking the "show details" link gives you a small drop-down with publishing verses readership information. In the future I'd love to see the option to view your reading habits with groups of blogs so I could reconsider which clusters deserved more attention. An alternate way to do this is to look for blogs you're not reading, or that have dried up using trends.

Assuming you read a blog every day, you can keep track of your reading habits (red) compared to when the blog is publishing (blue).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Web-based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading's worst enemy. A speed-reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it's kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you're still seeing what you came there to see--you just don't have the luxury of taking your time.

Time is actually the key focus of Spreed. It centers on a speed-reading player that will only show you three or four words of a story at a time, and in rapid succession. As your reading skills improve you can ramp up the number of words per minute it shows you, letting you speed-read any story at whatever level you're capable of. Sure you could do this on your own, but Spreed forces you to look at nothing else but the words, making reading a distraction-free, yet slightly anxiety-inducing experience.

Like Netvibes, My Yahoo and others, Spreed has a built-in directory of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. What makes it neat is that it gives you a estimation of how long it will take to go through a story based on its length and your current WPM setting. It also shows you the time it thinks it would take you to read the story when not in speed-read mode, along with a link in between the two to jump to the site itself. You can even plug in Microsoft Word documents, effectively making it a free speed-reading training tool.

In addition to the desktop flavor, Spreed has an iPhone variation that will let you access your bookmarked feeds and read them using the same speed viewer. It too has a quick WPM selector in case you want to dial it up a notch.

Ideally in the future Spreed could come out with a browser plug-in or bookmarklet that will take any story or RSS entry and run it through its player, letting you use a more capable RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines to add in some of the features it's missing like link sharing, folders, and favoriting.

[via SimpleSpark]

Spreed takes full RSS feeds and makes them easy to parse with a speed-reading player. You can tweak how many words per minute you want to read at and it will adjust accordingly. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Mippin, a mobile feed reading service I looked at back in late 2007, has undergone a world of change in the last 10 months. On Tuesday night, the site is launching a new version aimed specifically at iPhone users--a growing segment of the market which will soon be even larger with the forthcoming release of the 3G model.

This new version follows in the footsteps of older iterations, but has been tweaked to fit the screen a little better, as well as deliver an overall performance increase in page load times. The company has also laid the groundwork for an upcoming recommendation system (launching in just a few weeks) that will learn from and adapt to your daily reading habits to give you suggestions of blogs and stories you should be looking at. This new system is based not only on keywords and previous reading history, but what other users have been reading and subscribing to.

Earlier Tuesday, I spoke with Mippin co-Founder Scott Beaumont about this new version, along with what's changed since I last looked at the product. Beaumont says that in 10 months Mippin has gone from covering 1,500 to 2,000 sites to tracking more than 92,000. From those, it's accumulated 12 million articles that can be searched in Mippin's story index.

One other thing that Beaumont is really excited about is how Mippin now handles the media found in blog posts. Besides pictures, audio and video regularly make their way into blog posts. Mippin would previously ignore this type of content. The new version will now convert Flash videos via a third-party service (in the background while you continue to browse), as well as natively play any audio files that have been embedded in posts. I gave it a spin on a non-YouTube video earlier--and while slow on EDGE it should be fairly nimble on the newer 3G handset or a hearty Wi-Fi connection.

The company has put together a comparison video of reading an RSS feed in Mippin compared with how long it takes to visit the normal page using gadget blog Engadget as a control. They're calling it the Pepsi challenge, but I think a far fairer comparison would be to stack it up against Google Reader for the iPhone, which can accomplish a similar feat albeit without the back and forth buttons to skip articles.

Another major difference between the two is that you can set Mippin up to act as a mobile Web start page, with a select group of feeds you want to read, along with customizable content Widgets (a la iGoogle). Google Reader mobile offers no such feat, but does let you open up several articles at a time on the same page. Beaumont says the team is working on an upcoming developer platform to let people create widgets for the start page element of the site, and share them in a centralized directory--something that should be popping up in the future.

I've embedded the Pepsi challenge video below.