The problem of information overload has long held great interest for
me.  Primarily because I suffer from it. Even introduced a concept
called “The greatest application never built” during Atlanta Startup Weekend 2
that drew some interest.  It also still has not been built. The comment
that “I didn’t come here for a new job” pretty much ended that
discussion.

To provide some insight to the depth of the issue I currently have 124 subscriptions and 4,517 unread articles in my RSS reader, NetNewsWire (which I consider the best reader out there).  I think you could say that I am beyond a social consumer of RSS feeds.

So I was excited when I met Jason Ardell some time ago and he told me about FeedScrub. Feedscrub describes itself as a spam filter for news feeds. I was an alpha tester of the product as well as an early private beta tester.  Last week Feedscrub extended its private beta.  Both AtlanTech and Mashable did reviews.

To add to what those folks had to say, the product is coming along nicely.  I used the pro feature of importing my NNW feeds into Feedscrub via OPML and it went off without a hitch.  I tried then to
import my Feedscrub feeds into NNW but that process returned errors. So I set about manually bringing them into NNW.  The process is time consuming and cumbersome for 124 feeds.  I told Jason about this and
his response was just to import those feeds that were overwhelming. Fair enough.  And one day I may get around to doing just that.  But I don’t know if I will or not.  Mainly because, as AtlanTech pointed out,the process of training the filter slows the reading experience.  Slows it to the point with NNW that it is borderline usable.

But one has to remember that this is a private beta product.  Feedscrub’s development effort thus far has been focused on NewsGator and Google Reader.  If you are using either of these as your RSS reader I suggest you give Feedscrub a try.

Use invite code “forceofgood” to sign up.

I am going to keep my eye on Feedscrub. It’s showing promise.