I might be a little slow to fully embrace the RSS revolution but that has changed drastically in the last 2 weeks. I had previously used RSS for creating the Now Like Photographs podcast, the Blogulution Reader, and in the Yahoo Widget News feed that sits on my work laptop to inform me of new stories. These are all great ways to use RSS to take the content I wanted off the internet and put it in a more digestable form outside the web browser. I still spent my lunch hours visiting various websites (listed in the little listing of Daily Reads on this site). I would scroll through Engadget, The Register, NY Times or whatever website until I found the overlap from my previous visit. Didn’t take more than 30 minutes and I enjoyed spending some time surfing the internet learning about whatever was on these sites.

Picking a Reader

I read several blogs where the writers talk about how they rely on a standalone RSS reader of web or local-client form to get all their information. They talk about how they are able to read thousands of stories a day (or make the decision to not read them in most cases). I figured I would give it a try and after looking through all the services, settled on Google Reader and NewsGator to try out. Why those two? Google because they usually do stuff right and will probably own the entire internet at the rate they are going and NewsGator since they offered a neat package of having an online reader, PDA reader, desktop app reader, and even a Media Center reader.

NewsGator

Google Reader was neat but it still suffers from the same problem that Gmail and most other Google apps have – you must be online to use them. This usually isn’t a problem but I like to have local copies of my content, especially email and pictures in case I decide to switch services or can’t get online for some reason. Gmail offers the ability to download messages and archive them online so you get the best of both worlds. The RSS reader doesn’t have anything like that until they make a standalone application. I like the idea of taking all the stuff I want to read and then looking at it on my PDA or laptop when I’m traveling or have some downtime somewhere that doesn’t have a internet connection. I also tend to get sick of sitting in front of a computer from work so I like to space out in front of the TV at home. NewsGator MCE works well for this since I can use a remote and not feel like I’m using a computer. Only complaint about the MCE edition is that you can’t mark items as read, it just lets you view new unread content. So the synchronization of all of NewsGator’s product/services ultimatlely pushed me to use them over Google. Maybe Google will buy them when they realize NewsGator is better. They certainly have the money and balls to do it. Anyways, I highly recommend trying NewsGator online out. It’s free to use the web version and you’ll be able to read more content and spend less time doing it.