UPDATED: I have added a permanent link to the story
Tom Weber, subbing for Wall Street Journal's Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg, has written a review of RSS news aggregators that appears in today's paper. You can find it online here. Excerpts:
To help juggle all those blogs, I've started playing around with a relatively new phenomenon called a newsreader. Rather than forcing you to jump from one blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a single place.
I've tested a number of popular newsreaders. At their best, they give you a customized online newspaper that tracks the blogs you're interested in. But using them is only worthwhile if you're willing to invest some time upfront getting organized.Newsreaders come in several varieties. One is a stand-alone software program you install on your PC. In that category, FeedDemon ($29.95 from Bradbury Software) is especially powerful, with extensive options for customizing the way news feeds appear on your screen.
Other newsreaders integrate news feeds into your e-mail on the theory that mail has become the catchall information center for many users. NewsGator ($29 from NewsGator Technologies) pulls feeds into Microsoft Outlook, while Oddpost combines blog feeds with an excellent Web-based e-mail service for $30 a year. For Mac users, Apple just announced it will include newsreader functions in the next version of its Safari Web browser -- a sign of how important the news-feed approach is becoming.
Overall, I had the best experience with a service called Bloglines, and I recommend it, especially for beginners. Bloglines works as a Web service, which means there's no software to install and you can catch up with your blogs from any Web browser. You're no longer tied to the bookmarks on a particular PC, so you can check postings from home, work or on the road. The service is also free. Mark Fletcher, CEO of Trustic Inc., which operates Bloglines, tells me the site will use unobtrusive Google-style ads to bring in revenue.
