I have been giving a number of workshops lately (the next one is on Tuesday morning at the Portals conference for Shared Insights). As part of the research and preparation for these talks I have been using all of the major RSS readers. Things have changed considerably since the last time I wrote about this topic. Here's my latest thinking and recommendations:

Best overall: Blogbridge Desktop

I had stopped using Blogbridge for a couple of months in order to try out the other readers I'll reference here. But now that I'm back to Blogbridge, I still think it is the best in class desktop reader. And I think that desktop readers are preferable to web readers in that they can incorporate critical features like built in smart feeds and reading lists that you cannot build into web readers. Blogbridge has it all:

• You can construct “smart feeds” from all of the major search engines: Google Blog search, Technorati, Amazon, Feedster, Conotea, and Findory. Moreover, you can build persistent searches around del.icio.us and Flickr tags. Robin Good who is the best RSS user I know uses smart feeds relentlessly to track news and information. I have come to believe that building and managing a collection of smart feeds is a critical productivity and business intelligence skill for the new web. Blogbridge does this by far better than any other reader.
• Reading Lists - a reading list is a dynamic collection of RSS feeds. As more and more information is managed by RSS, we will need tools to manage collections of feeds. Blogbridge is building those tools. You can create a collection of feeds in BlogBridge and then publish the URL for the collection. When that URL is added to Blogbridge by other users, they get the whole collection. And if you make changes to the collection, they dynamically propagate to the Blogbridge readers subscribed.
• Integration with del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us to tag and categorize everything. Now if I find something inside Blogbridge, I can tag things to my del.icio.us account from Blogbridge.
• Integration with BlogBridge library. Another tool for building and finding feed collections. You can add collections, including my own Learning and Collaboration collection from inside Blogbridge.

Blogbridge also has some drawbacks. It is a memory hog. I have been tracking memory consumption in my activity monitor for my MacBook and Blogbridge is the most memory intensive application I am using. (I have a lot of feeds in my reader.) It can really slow things down. Pito and his development team are working on this issue and in the lastest weekly version, things are much improved. The other drawback is the flip side of its strengths: it is not web-based. Great for reading feeds on the train and plane. But I have to switch out of my browser to read and add feeds. (Firefox 2.0 allows me to add new feeds from the browser to Blogbridge.)

Best web reader: google reader

Google has recently updated its web reader and it is a terrific tool. Very fast and easy to use. It is probably the best place to start for new users of RSS. Get a google reader account, find some interesting and useful collections and start reading. Google reader also has its drawbacks: I cannot add feed collections to a folder. Instead, I add new feeds and reading lists to the reader and then I have go into the back end admin area and categorize them. This is a big pain. But the big RSS dudes like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble are using Google Reader as an interface to a river of news. They don't categorize anything. Just load it up and read everything in a long continuous scrolling window.

Other readers worth mentioning



Flock: Flock is a browser built on Firefox. It doesn't work properly with my Intel Core Duo MacBook but when it worked with my Powerbook G4, I loved using it for RSS reading in the browser. It has a very nice interface and is the favorite reader of Jaime Chamorro here at the Otter Group.

Newsgator Online: I signed up for a professional newsgator account. It has built in smart feeds but for reasons that I cannot really explain, I don't like the interface. I just find it hard to read. But if you want smart feeds built into a web reader and don't want to have to build them yourself inside Google Reader, Newsgator Online is your best option.

Newsgator for Outlook: Some folks like to read their feeds inside their email client. If you are an Outlook user and that is your preference, Newsgator for Outlook is for you.

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