Pheedstorm (former Webu) 2.05

Pheedstorm is an RSS reader that aims to find articles that it thinks you will find interesting, rather than just notify you when one of your feeds has some new content. RSS was originally introduced to make it easier to find out when your favourite web sites had updated content, the idea was that you would "subscribe" to feeds from a number of sites and an RSS reader would monitor these and let you know when new articles were found.

This is definitely better than you having to visit each site every day, but you still have a problem in that if you subscribe to a large number of feeds that are regularly updated (I subscribe to around 60 various feeds), you can still end up with an overwhelming amount of content to browse through, much of it utterly irrelevent to your particular interests.

For example, take a look at the home page of any major news site (BBC, CNN etc.) - you will probably find half of the articles displayed on any given day worth reading and many you would find boring and irrelevant.

Major Features:

1. Pheedstorm enables you to subscribe to all your favourite feeds, but rather than simply notifying you about all new articles, it analyses each one to try and work out whether you will find it interesting or not.
2. If the article reaches a particular "relevance factor" it will be shown, otherwise it will not bother you. It does this by using feedback that you provide it to let it know how relevant you find particular articles on a scale of -10 to +10, for example if you are fairly interested in articles about the economy and interest rates and an article about this appears, you could mark it as +5.
3. If the article also mentions your home town you might want to mark it +8. If however an article appears about something you are completely disinterested in, give it a negative rating.
4. Over time, the program learns about the kind of articles you like and shows similar articles when they are published on your feeds.
5. You can also use it as a "standard" RSS reader, and have it show you all new articles on a feed.
6. You can also set up specific keyword alerts, e.g. show all articles with the word "IRAQ" even if they don't meet the relevance normally required.