I recevied a question this morning that I thought I’d pass on. A non-geek wants to filter RSS feeds for certain terms. What’s your preferred tool for this? I’m aware of Feedshake, which I just used to create a feed of all Boing Boing posts that mention the word ‘pants’.
You could also use Yahoo Pipes to make something similar, though that’s not for the feint of heart. I’m sure there are some client-side options as well in tools like NewsGator, but I’m not familiar with them.
Feedshake looks viable, but what would you recommend to a Regular Human wanting to filter her RSS feeds?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Regular humans don’t want to filter RSS feeds.
“Feint of heart”? Bee stijl my hart.
Nuts! Filtering RSS feeds is critical. Especially if you want to take the resulting feed and republish it via Javascript. I’ve been trying to do this in a robust way for years.
In my case, I want to allow students to be able to use their own blogs, but only pass on whatever content is relevant to aggregated courseblogs. So they can write about a post about binge drinking or Wii, and then a post about Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and the content gets syndicated and republished in the right places more or less automatically. The students control their own spaces, not the school.
This is another service, I can’t assess it one way or the other – I last tested it a long time ago:
http://feedrinse.com/
There are a few solutions here.
Thanks for the tips! Sorry I had to leave early…
Blogdigger will do this as long as you know the blog ID.
Here’s a filter of my feed for only postings containing the word “snowflake”
http://www.blogdigger.com/search?q=blogID%3A133666+snowflake&sortby=date
and here’s the resulting search feed
http://www.blogdigger.com/search?q=blogID%3A133666+snowflake&sortby=date&type=rss
I kid! I kid!
Brian: you are of course right that RSS remixing is an excellent thing. But at this point, I don’t know of anyone (maybe I travel in small social circles) who is both non-geeky and uses feeds.
Actively filtering and aggregating feeds is, at this point in time, a definitively geeky activity.
This post has been useful to me, as I have long been looking for a way to publish an easily accessible “OmniRyan” feed for my various feed-monitored online activities.
I’m behind, but finally am interested in FeedShake, but apparently it has disappeared. Can anyone help?
I would like to suggest a great new site that organizes your RSS feeds.
It employs a bayesian filter for RSS feeds where you can train the filter what you like and
what you don’t like. It’s free, try it at http://www.filteredrss.com.