We all have different ways of keeping up with the news, whether it’s international events, local sports or tidbits related to our professions. Many people use RSS feed readers regularly to quickly scan the headlines from all their favorite news sites and blogs before setting off to the specific sites to read more. I’m curious which news reader (or readers) you use and why you use it. Does it have specific features you like? Is it easy to use? Feel free to include personalized news sites such as My Yahoo or Netvibes if that’s where you go to read your news feeds. And if you get feeds sent to you by email, tell us about that. I’ll try to tally up the various services used, and will run the more interesting responses (and reasons) in next week’s Your Take Roundup.
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Which RSS news reader do you use and why?
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I use IE 7 (Beta 3). Fast, easy-to-use, and efficient. And free.
I use google reader because it’s an online app. I can log on where ever, and it has my contacts list from Gmail for easy forwarding. It’s great.
I am so loving Newsgator. I like its clipping feature as well as its preview feature. Tried Bloglines before that and found it too clunky and uneasy to read. Newsgator has treated me well.
NetNewsWire for the Mac becuase it allows me to easily switch between subscriptions, posts and content using only my tab and arrow keys.
NetNewsWire is brilliant, and now it syncs to Newsgator, so your RSS feeds can follow you anywhere via the web.
I Read Different Information via Different Tools:
Bloglines – Primary Blog/News Reader
Outlook – “work” related project and workspace feeds from http://www.centraldesktop.com .
I separate my “work” RSS Feeds into Outlook b/c I “live” in Outlook where my email resides. To read RSS Feeds in Outlook, I use the http://www.attensa.com Outlook Plugin.
MyYahoo – For Financial News, Company Information and RSS Feeds that I can ‘scan’ but that doesn’t need to be refreshed as quickly and often as Bloglines or Outlook feeds.
Gmail Snippets – This is kind of useless in my opinion. But I subscribe to a few Snippets via RSS in the odd event that my eyes veer to the top of my screen and read more trivial RSS Feeds.
On Windows, I preferred FeedDemon. I liked the way it allowed me to organize my feeds and the way it let me scan feeds for each individual blogs (good reading pane).
I recently bought a MacBook and decided the Mac side would be for RSS, multimedia, Web stuff, blogging and such (while the windows side is for writing code/development). I’m using Vienna. It’s free. I can’t scan the complete feed of a blog, just headlines, but I’m adjusting.
I’m using Google Reader, which is a very easy to use application. I also have a Reader module on my personalized Google homepage, which has a neet pop-out cartoon bubble preview feature.
Another vote for Google reader. The interface is awesome, plus it’s usable from anywhere.
Hi Mark,
I use 2;
Klipfolio, which I use to create a full screen online monitoring dashboard. This little program is made of different Klips which can contain 1 or several feeds. It also has auto-discovery of feeds and one click subscribe + it allows you to put alerts based on keywords in any feed. This is one of the main reasons why I use it for monitoring purposes.
The integrated RSS reader in the Flock browser. This one I use to read and subscribe to) less urgent feed updates. The browser is great and also has auto-discovery and 1 click subscribe.
RSS by e-mail; most of the ones I am registered to are through the Feedburner solution or Feedblitz. On my own blog I also offer e-mail subscription (based on my RSS feed) but just switched from the Feedburner solution to a free service called Zookoda… It is a full e-mail Newsletter marketing system based on RSS feeds. More features than anything I have seen before.
Looking forward to next week.
i use a few web-based readers…
– my yahoo (but it’s slow with a lot of feeds. i’m sure they will fix that)
– yahoo mail (since i use yahoo mail, this is going to be great when they add folders)
– google reader on the google personalized home page (the module)
– google reader on my mobile device (this rocks as it’s fast and personalized)
– netvibes
i forgot – i also get a few rss feeds delivered by email (using feedburner’s rss to email solution (my employer))…
I’m surprised that no one but me seems to use the Sage news reader for firefox. It loads in a sidebar and the individual feeds are highlighted if there are new items. I love it.
NetNewsWire Pro for Macintosh. Have used it since it was in early beta. LOVE it.
I actually teach a class that includes RSS, and I push new RSS users (including my own family) towards Google Reader. Free, straightforward, great for a few feeds. Conveinent for those who already have a Gmail or Google News account.
I have used Bloglines for a few years now, and I couldn’t be happier. I find it more convenient than Google Reader. Plus it lets you show people your public feeds: http://www.bloglines.com/public/cgibby/.
I use Netvibes. Fantastic tool to personnalize and organize to scan professionnal news. Very easy to use and organize. The only pb is to get the right feeds, it’s still chaos around the blogs to get easily their rss feeds.
Sage on Firefox is the way to go for me. Easy, easy, easy. It reads any rss feeds and operates seamlessly within firefox’s browser window.
Before the big feeds trend, I had a My Yahoo! account for news. I still use it to check the headlines of major news like Reuters, AP, and some other things (it’s connected to the e-mail I use for stuff related to my blogs). I use Bloglines now as my primary feed reader, but I use it strictly for blogs. I am hooked. It is fairly easy to use; I like their interface the way you can mark stuff to read later or make clip folders. I gave Newsgator a try for news sources, and I use it mostly for some news items I keep up with, but I don’t log on to it as often. I did it as an experiment to try something else. Their interface seems relatively slow at times (and I have high speed), and it does not automatically mark stuff as read as Bloglines does. I may give the Google reader a try yet. We’ll see. Overall, however, I do prefer something that is Web-based, since I work on a computer at work and then at home. Something on the PC does not make that much sense to me at this point.
I use FeedDemon 2.0.0.23 and I like it a lot. It’s easy to use, full of interesting features (most of which I haven’t even begun to exploit) and it allows a a great deal of personalization.
Significantly, ever since I started using an RSS reader, I post a lot more on my blog, but each post is a lot shorter. Plus, now posts tend to be more directive torwards sources and less opinative. Conclusion: when you use an RSS reader, your information gathering tends to be less intensive and more extensive (and so your posts). That should mean something on the way we connect to the world. Meaning: an RSS reader is not just a tool; it is a tool that changes the world, in a way.
I use RSS feed modules on my personalized Google homepage for work-related feeds (with the Google reader module for the less-important and infrequently updated blogs). I keep up with my social blogosphere (people I know or read for pleasure) via Pluck’s built-in RSS reader. I have tried Sharpreader, Bloglines, NewsGator, My Yahoo! and others but they just didn’t work for me. I also occasionally click on the RSS snippets in my Gmail, but I’ve never personalized the feature.
I use Sage for Firefox, but yesterday I downloaded RSS FeedPopper v1.8 when it was promoted on the Apple Web site. So far, so good! It has a nice, clean design (like Sage) but it has a sidebar that pops up on the side of my screen when there’s new news. I’ll probably use both feed readers (Sage and FeedPopper), but I like the handiness of having headlines pop up like they do in FeedPopper.
Another vote for Sage – the interface and simplicity can’t be beat.
FeedDemon – it’s fast, offers powerful searching and sorting, and it synchronizes with all the other NewsGator offerings.
I use Simply Headlines (http://www.simplyheadlines.com) It’s FREE and easy to use – and when I’m out of the office, I read the text version from my Treo email.