One of the challenges facing users of RSS and Atom feeds is finding feeds worth subscribing to. If you're lucky enough to be looking for a feed on a subject addressed by a major news organization, and you can find a major news organization that publishes newsfeeds, life's not so bad (except that it's still not so easy finding news organizations that publish newsfeeds). If you looking for something a little more specialized, a little more fringe, finding a quality feed can be next to, if not, impossible.

Sites like Syndic8, BlogShares, Technorati and the like give some measure of a feed's popularity in terms of number of subscribers, number of inbound links, etc. Links from your favorite blogs to other blogs can be helpful--if you like their blog, you may like the blogs they like. But what would really be useful is a site with newsfeed reviews...by the time I finish writing this, I might start making plans to create such a site. A number of reviewers could post their reviews and more importantly their rankings of newsfeeds. When someone comes to the site looking for good feeds, they'll have multiple ways to find them.

First, they can search through a categorized list of feeds and pick feeds with high average scores. Second, they can pick a reviewer and see what that person's favorites are.

But the ultimate tool for choosing good feeds would be to score a bunch of feeds yourself, and then search for the favorite feeds of whichever reviewer your ratings are closest to. The same kind of system would be great for movie reviews. Ebert and Roeper are interesting enough to listen to, but wouldn't it be more useful to listen to reviews by someone who likes the same kinds of movies as you? That can't be done on TV without having a gazillion movie reviews shows, but on the web? No problem.

Well, less talk, more code. I think I'll get to work on building the site.