FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.
FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.
