Would You Like An Application With That?

If you know where you want your RSS feeds to appear, you're already halfway home to a decision. There are clear market leaders in each of several categories:

Mac users. For those who run Mac OS X, the overwhelming favorite client-based RSS reader is NetNewsWire. If you're not going to use Apple's Safari browser - which has had RSS support built in since Mac OS X 10.4 - NetNewsWire is the obvious choice.

Firefox users. Firefox, the fast-growing browser alternative to Internet Explorer, has a native feature called Live Bookmarks. Since this displays only headlines in a pull-down bar, however, many Firefox users prefer to install a separate "extension" to read RSS feeds. Far and away the most popular extension is Sage, which adds newspaper-style feed rendering within the browser.

Users of both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you use IE at work, but run Firefox at home, you'll be interested in Pluck 2.0. It's the first RSS reader that synchronizes your selected feeds between different browsers and even different operating systems, according to Pluck CEO Dave Panos. Pluck offers an IE BHO (browser helper object), a Firefox extension (which is in a late beta with full release within weeks, Panos says), and a Web server that matches up your feeds on different machines.

Microsoft Outlook users. There are plenty of reasons to integrate RSS feeds into your e-mail inbox. For one thing, you're probably checking your e-mail application several times a day already - why not check your feeds, too? If your e-mail client of choice is Microsoft Outlook, the obvious adjunct is NewsGator Outlook Edition. (The company is unrelated to Gator, an adware publisher now known as Claria.) Starting at $19.95 per year, Outlook Edition allows corporate admins to configure RSS feeds for mobile phones and other devices in addition to Outlook. And NewsGator's E-mail Edition supports Outlook Express, Eudora, or any POP3 e-mail client.

Standalone RSS readers. You may want your RSS reader to be completely separate from any other application. That way, you can open and close it independently, move its window around without regard for which other apps are running, and more. If so, arguably the most popular standalone aggregator is FeedDemon, a $29.95 application. Since FeedDemon was purchased in May by NewsGator, full integration between the different program's components is promised soon.

Podcasts only. If you just want to download podcasts - which are RSS feeds associated with audio files - you don't need a specialized RSS reader. Instead, you can use a specialized music download app. Apple's iTunes (starting with version 4.9, which was released on June 28) and the open-source iPodder will do the trick. Of course, you can also get both podcasts and regular RSS feeds using FeedStation, a free beta feature of NewsGator and FeedDemon.