Most of us skim through blog posts and online news articles trying to get to the “meat” of the information. This daily exercise is critical to understanding what is being said about one’s company or clients, especially if you go to work each day as a PR professional.

However, it can be very time-consuming. You may find yourself feeling overwhelmed with the plethora of information that requires what I’ll refer to as a “mental filter”– but, you want to be able to find the pertinent information quickly and effectively. We do have a few tools to help us out– Google Reader, iGoogle, eAlerts–the list goes on. But what happens when even these tools start to become cumbersome, as the Internet continues to grow exponentially, and you find yourself filtering through the already filtered, just to get the good stuff?

Your solution? AideRSS. From their site:

“There are over 86 million blogs, and each one has an RSS feed. All it takes is a few subscriptions to the sites that interest you, and your feed reader is overwhelmed with a never-ending stream of hundreds of headlines. Like an aide or a personal assistant, AideRSS helps to filter and rank these feeds based on a number of criteria to help you read what matters, ensure that you find the good stuff, and to help keep things organized and manageable.”

Simply put, the tag line says it all: “Read What Matters.”

This tool has great potential to help understand and manage all that is being said, pro and con, about a company online. Additionally, you can organize these conversations to see the hot-button issues and reader’s reactions.

Expand the stories you want to read within the feed, see how many comments, conversations, bookmarks and tweets (come on, you should know what a tweet is by now!) a post received. Also, AideRSS will analyze a blog for you, helping you gain a quick snapshot of all posts from one blog. With this feature, you will quickly be able to see the best posts (based on their ranking system) and get a better feel for a blog with which you are just becoming familiar. It’s a great way to see if you really want or need to subscribe to that site’s RSS feed.

From maintaining a daily snapshot of what’s just being said in the social media sphere, to managing crises online, AideRSS is sure to make the daily routine somewhat more manageable and may just tame the chaotic scramble that ensues when unforeseen issues arise.

It’s a free resource and I suggest you give it a chance. Tailor the elements to your liking and then you may begin to Read What Matters.