Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb for letting me know about the New York Times’ recent Custom Feeds tool, available at http://prototype.nytimes.com/customFeeds/.

Essentially this tool gives you the ability to create keyword-based RSS feeds for New York Times content, but also enhances that essential idea with a couple of extras.

Here’s a snapshot of the site. First thing you do is enter a topic or keyword in which you’re interested. The tool will suggest other terms based on the keyword you initially entered. (As you can see I entered Washington and the NYT had lots of suggestions for that.) Next you choose which keywords you want to add to your custom feed. (You can add several if you like.) When you enter keywords, the tool will evaluate the feed, testing to see how many articles in the past 30 days include your term(s) (or, if it’s a very active term, how many articles in the last one day included your term(s).) This is AWESOME; you’ll know right away if a feed is going to contain too much/too little content without having to run tests.

Once you have a term or set of terms you like, enter a title for the feed and click the “Subscribe” button. The NYT will kick out a RSS file that has a pretty good snippets from NYT articles as well as the occasional image.

The only thing that even bothered me a little bit about this tool is the fact that you have to enter your own feed titles, which would slow things down if you wanted to create a lot of feeds. Other than that these extras as terrific. Highly recommend this tool.