I am using the Newsgator Online RSS reader and simply want to order my most important, must-read blogs (i.e mine) at the top. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable requirement. From a cursory glance at the documentation, it is not immediately clear if I can even do this in Newsgator. This is a little irritating as I now have to do some work to scroll down to ‘Oracle’ or rename the folder as ‘AAAOracle’. And, yes, you’re right, I am very lazy.
Then I stumbled across a blog article on SearchFox which is another Web based RSS reader (like Newsgator) but with an interesting personalisation and recommendation engine which automatically bubbles your favourite, most frequently read articles and blogs to the top of your reading list.
This sounds interesting. It is a pity that SearchFox is another Web 2.0 application that is in beta and currently open to a selected few who must apply for an account. Still, I sent them a polite email citing my recent review and asked for access to evaluate their product. I even used a Gmail address to prove my Web 2.0 credentials. I sent the email yesterday and am now polling my Google Inbox every ten seconds.
I stumbled across SearchFox on a arbitrary blog search on feedster about RSS and it struck me that, in the past, I would use Google (Web, Groups), TuCows, SourceForge, Freshmeat to find OpenSource, free RSS readers.
However most of these sources are relatively out of date and had failed to unearth SearchFox when I was recently looking for RSS readers. The fast moving blogosphere is much better suited to finding these sort of hip, new Web 2.0 applications.