How do you keep abreast of what is happening in the world of football? For me it is a mix of NewsNow and RSS feeds from my favourite sites.

It is a system that I find works well for me yet there could be a better solution if Football Filter lives up to its promise.

The plan for Football Filter is quite ambitious as it aims to provide the same news spidering service as NewsNow but with added insight: whereas on other services you only get the headlines, here you can also se the first couple of sentences of each article you roll your mouse over helping you avoid clicking on to stories with an interesting title but that are effectively of little interest.

This, for me, is a major plus point seeing that I have the tendency to get lost reading one meaningless article after another. The way that the site is presented is another bonus as it allows a quick overview of what different sites are saying

A Liverpool specific section was added last month (and they graciously agreed to include A Liverpool Thing) but it reveals one of the challenges that face Football Filter. One of the main blogs listed is Liverpool Access yet the latest post on that – dated towards the end of last season - says that it will be taking a break.

Given the nature of the internet and most blogs which seem to be going strong one week and then don’t add a new post for months, Filter’s authors will have to keep a closer check on the sites they are feature to avoid having what are effectively dead links.

There are other tweaks that will have to be made. Opening up articles automatically in a new window is one of them and the operation of the site does seem a bit clunky. Yet all that is nit picking. I have to admit that I love the whole idea and its execution and this site is already one of my favourites.

A Brief Chat with Ben Fawkes
Here's what Ben Fawkes, the main man behind FootballFilter.com had to say about the whole idea:

When did the idea for the service come about?
About a year ago - I was working in America for a couple of months on an internship and was feeling a bit cut off from the football world; at the time I was using the BBC, Guardian and occasionally football365 to find out what was going on but I was beginning to get a bit sick of their style (particularly the Guardian and BBC, not really F365) and the way they only concentrated on the premiership. So it kind of came from this really, I wanted to be able to cover alot of different sources and centralise them into one place - so I made a Digg clone using Pligg and tried my hardest to get people involved in submitting ideas, which after about 3months failed, which when I met Mike (Derby fan and wing man for footballfilter) who is a web developer, we spoke about how great PopUrls was and how it could be used for football - and that's it really!

What does it offer that is different from other such services?
Ok, well obviously Netvibes and igoogle have similar concepts, but you have to do all the hard work setting up the feeds -we have done that for you and are frantically trying to set up the specific team pages and also new leagues - also podcasts, videos and images aren't as nicely laid out in these formats (in our opinion) so I think there is definitely space in the internet world for what we are trying to do.

As for NewsNow, which is also similar to us in terms of news aggregating, a lot of people have praised us for our layout and format in comparison to NewsNow, so I think what we offer is a simpler, cleaner way of keeping up with whats going on.

How has the feedback been like?
Brilliant, pretty much everyone who has seen it has liked it, some people find it overwhelming, which is understandable but I think people are slowly appreciating the value of it, especially as we develop the team pages!

What plans for the future?
Priority number one is to get the team pages done for the prem, championship, scottish prem and so on. Then we want to make a championship homepage, SPL homepage, Bundesliga homepage and so and so until we have nailed everything.

Then we want to work on customisation which allow users to chose different colours for backgrounds, decide if they want the links to open in new windows, how many feeds per row etc etc.

After that we want to work on stats so we can have the most popular links show at the top of the homepage and other stat type info...its going to take a while and I can't wait.Other than that, just continue to contribute to the online football community really, we post alot of photos on flickr and I would love to work on more things on youtube (ie make our own vids and the like), develop our blog, get some writers for it if there was an interest, just basically become a hub for football!