A Conversation with Filtrbox's Ari Newman

With the proliferation of information sources and ways to read them, it seems counter-intuitive that one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere is still aggregation, discovery and syndication. Yet here we are, yet another day, yet another Twitter story, yet another FriendFeed story, and yet another Digg story.

Don't get me wrong - I too have a obsessive fascination with the nuanced myriad of way we can move our 1's and 0's around. That's why when I got a ping from Ari Newman, founder and president of company making an AI-powered news filtration service, my ears perked up.

I had a chance to bring him on the Mashable Conversations podcast so I could learn a bit about it. It's that's suitable for news junkies and professional bloggers like myself, but it's primarily targeted to marketing and public relations professionals, as it has a wide variety of graphing and search functions that serve to aggregate keyword searched news from just about every source out there.

It is capable of pulling in any RSS source, any Google alert, and is able to search across a wide variety of sources, from New Media and Old. 

What seems to be clincher on this is the review system, which attempts to learn with at "three dimensional rating system" exactly the style of news you're interested in.  After you're done setting up your complex filtering requirements, you can begin to subtly refine the filters to find the topics you're tracking by rating the source types.  For instance, if you're more interested in finding out user comments, you can place an emphasis on feeds coming out of FriendFeed or Twitter.  If you're focused on New Media response, or a specific response, you can highly rate certain blogs or a certain genre of blogs, and the system will pick up on those relationships.

It sounds like a very advanced system, and it only launched this Monday, so I haven't begun to explore the whole depth of it yet, but what I've been played with so far has kept me intrigued.