Reading RSS feeds

There a variety of tools you can use to read or subscribe to RSS feeds. Most are free, though may charge a fee for premium services. Some of the most popular options include:

Google's personalized home page is an easy way to start out with RSS, or to keep track of a small number of feeds more frequently than you'd check your main newsreader. On the add content page you can choose from a wide range of popular news feeds on different topics, or you can hit the "add URL" button (to the right of the search field at the top of the page) to add a specific URL. For example, you might want to set up a Technorati search on your organization's name (see below), and subscribe to the feed for that search on your Google home page, so that you'll see the latest news anytime you stop by Google.

Bloglines makes it easy to read and organize RSS feeds, and even to create your own blog by creating "clippings" from favorite articles. One nice feature of Bloglines is the ability to create search feeds that just search within the blogs you currently track; if you are trying to keep on top of a big subject like "climate change", you might want to create a Bloglines account that you can use to subscribe to a few dozen of the most important or valuable environmental blogs, and then set up a feed that searches just those blogs for the phrase "climate change". Click here for step-by-step instructions on using Bloglines.

Pluck comes in a few different versions that work well for different sortys of uses. You can get a version that integrates with the Internet Explorer or Firefox web browsers, or a stand-alone web edition. Click here for step-by-step instructions on using Pluck.

Newsgator is another popular RSS reader, and offers the ability to set up search-based feeds directly within Newsgator itself. For $29.95 you can buy a software tool that will download your Newsgator feeds to Microsoft Outlook.

You can find longer lists of RSS readers (aka aggregators) on Lockergnome's RSS Quickstart Guide and on this wiki.