After an incredible amount of time working with, and for, PostRank, I think I have finally landed on what I would like to do with their technology that would be useful to me.
Back when I was working a lot on their Google Reader Greasemonkey overlay, one of the features requested was “sort by PostRank”, which never made a lot of sense to me. Sort what by PostRank?
Buckets.
I want to read basically everything that comes through my feedreader, or at least see the headlines, but I may not care about it all at this moment. I don’t want an interestingness sort or filter, I want a bucketizer. I want to be able to say “I’ll read the best stuff right now when I’ve got a few seconds, and the rest later.”
I may never read the rest, which then amounts to filtering, but I may, and that’s different.
The best way to implement something like this would be to allow for “filtering” by PostRank ranges instead of having a max cutoff. That way I could have a 7+ feed, a 3-7 feed, and a 3- feed, for each feed. I’d then make (in my reader) a “Best” folder, a “Good” folder, and a “Bottomfeeder” folder. I’d process the content in “Best” a few times a day, “Good” at least once a week, “Bottomfeeder” whenever I had extra time to read stuff.
I actually really like this idea. A lot.