Ratings
One neat feature of Cyndicate is the ratings feature. As you read each article you can give it a star rating from 1 to 5. You can then sort and organize articles by their rating. The rating can be set by either having the rating column showing in the article table and clicking in it or by selecting a rating from the Ratings menu that is in the Article menu.
The really cool part of it is that Cyndicate will learn what you like based on the rating and will then automatically rate new articles as they are fetched. This allows you to do really useful stuff like making a smart folder that shows new articles with a 4 or 5 star rating to quickly get caught up with the news that you find most interesting. It can be a huge time savings when you’re trying to cut through the cruft.
The automatic rating system does take a little time to learn your likes and dislikes. The more articles you rate, the more accurate it will become. Remember to mark down articles you don’t like as well as marking up articles you do like. The system works best when you’re telling it both you’re likes and dislikes so that it can weigh the two against each other.
You can think of it like the spam filter in your email client. It get gets better at correctly marking spam the more you mark email as being spam and unmark the emails that it incorrectly marked as spam. The only difference being that Cyndicate takes a little bit more work to teach then email spam. This is do to the nature of the content. We can all pretty much agree that the viagra or mortgage email is spam so they can give some default matching data, but with news articles what you like and dislike can be vastly different then the next guy. Take a political blog for instance, a Republican will mostly likely rate the articles in a very differently, perhaps completely opposite, than what a Democrat might rate the same articles. So have a little bit of patience with it at the start. It will pay off in the long run.