Archive for January, 2009

Happy 2009!

January 28th, 2009

It’s a new year. 2009 is a big year for me and I can’t wait to get it under way.

This year, I graduate Georgia Tech with an undergrad in Management. That means I have to find gainful employment or move back to the parents’ place. I think they’d probably prefer me to find gainful employment. I’m interning this semester with Masten Space Systems, learning from Michael Mealling, their VP of Business Development and helping him manage his workflow. In addition to that, I’m still working part-time at GTRI, working on SugarCRM customization. I’ve got 15 hours of classes to finish up before I graduate, but it’s a manageable load.

I just got back from Florida visiting my old roommate, who works on A-10s at Eglin. Next week I get to go to Timothy’s (another old roommate) wedding. In April I’m going out to Phoenix to the Space Access Conference – I’m looking forward to meeting some more people in the new space industry and hearing some very smart people speak about the industry and where it’s at. I’ve always been interested in space (I have Dad to thank for that) and I’d LOVE to work in the industry over the next few years doing the business side of things.

2009 promises to be a fun and exciting year. I’m looking forward to it! What are you up to this year? Big plans going down all around?

Filter RSS Feeds with FeedScrub

January 14th, 2009

Jason Ardell and Tim Dorr, two friends of mine and founders of FeedScrub, are launching a beta today. I have some invite codes for my readers and wanted to say a couple words about FeedScrub (I’ll post soon with a “why I’ve been dormant for months and what I’m up to).

FeedScrub helps you filter feeds with large amounts of incoming data to give you only the information you’re interested in. Simply get an account, plug in a feed, and subscribe to the scrubbed feed in your RSS reader. You then “train” the filter and soon you end up with only the posts from that feed that are interesting to you. This can be especially useful if you subscribe to TechCrunch, HackerNews, SlashDot, Fark, or anything else that pushes through way more stories than you want to read. Soon, you’ll only have interesting stories coming through.

Give FeedScrub a shot. User the invite code “colinake” – and if you use Google Reader, use this tutorial to get started. I think you’ll find value in it!

Colin

Official Press Release:

Feedscrub intelligently filters RSS feeds
Atlanta, GA. – January 14th, 2009 – Feedscrub Inc.

Feedscrub Inc. today announced the private beta launch of www.feedscrub.com, a web application for intelligently filtering news feeds.  The service is targeted particularly at bloggers who keep up with hundreds of feeds and want to extract stories that are highly relevant to their reader base.

Existing RSS filters focus on filtering out particular keywords, creating the possibility of false positives (deleting something the user wanted).  Feedscrub realizes that users have unique interests, and that past interest in similar posts is a better relevance indicator than other metrics such as social interaction.  It is personalized to your preferences so you only read what interests you, and it gets smarter as you train it to minimize filtering out stories you’d like to read.

Feedscrub supports RSS and Atom formats, and can be used with any feed reader (e.g. Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Newsgator).

About Feedscrub Inc.
Founded in July, 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Feedscrub provides intelligent filtering for news feeds to prevent information overload.  Users subscribe to feeds through Feedscrub then teach it which posts they like and dislike.  As Feedscrub learns what a user dislikes it automatically filters posts into a junk feed that the user can ignore.  For more information, visit www.feedscrub.com.

Contact Information:
Jason Ardell
Co-Founder & CEO, FeedScrub Inc.
jason [at] feedscrub.com