I’ve produced an experimental social media news page using Feedly Mixes. You can embed this sort of thing into any site you like.

As you can see, it grabs and mixes up the content from selected RSS feeds – a list of sites covering the subject, as chosen by me. It then ranks the articles according to whether I deem a particular site important. Articles that I tweet or share in Feedly will also be included and take precedence on the page. Then it uses Google Reader’s statistics on how many people read, saved and shared articles to bubble up leading stories. Finally, it uses the age of the article as a fourth filter. The content is refreshed every 3–4 hours.

I’m not sure that my particular implementation is especially useful. The sort of person likely to visit this site almost certainly already reads the sites I have selected.

However, I think it could be a really useful tool in other circumstances. If you work in a particular domain – let’s say it’s construction – then it really is child’s play to create a page that gives a digest of the day’s news from the publications that deal with that area. That page could be set as everyone’s home page in your firm, or a link on the browser’s favourites bar, making sure the whole business is up-to-date with the latest news.

It’s better than the sort of pages you get at Alltop because you decide and curate the content sources – the construction page on that site is a good example of why you want this – a lot of the sources are US-based, which won’t be very relevant if, like me, you’re based in South London. There’s also no way I can see to flag particular stories as important.

A slightly more poetic use for Feedly Mixes might be the Interesting Pictures feed from flickr or ffffound. Maybe a personalised web comics page or a selection of new short stories.

NB: WordPress doesn’t deal well with the iFrames used to display the Feedly Widget on pages – you’ll need to install the Embed iFrame plug-in to get it to work.