http://www.curiostudio.com/

i think it fits all your needs. It’s nice you can even set it up to color code the feeds so each time silky is mentioned you can have the blog post colored pink (sorry, I could not resist).

It is stand alone though, but i think it’s feature warrent that

One major flaw with Omea Reader is OR’s dependance on IE. I can’t stand IE, and hold my nose anytime it’s running. That means I’m now seeing ads that would have been blocked, I have to reconfigure the IE cookie handling procedures…hmmmph.

Google Reader behaves itself well enough, and is right at home in Firefox.

Copy and paste it somewhere so you can enter it when installing the software.

For most the pro version will be overkill unless you use tasks and outlook email (not express) heavily, and you want to index all your correspondence in Office and Documents and such.

For just research the basic version has plenty of power.

I always thought that Allah was already using a Mac. No?

I have FeedDemon on a Windows-based laptop. You do not have to check the feeds individually. Just select a folder or group. You’ll see every new item from all the subscriptions in that group.

Truth is it was the first one I tried based solely on the positive ratings. Can’t honestly compare it…but it works.

http://my.gritwire.com/

http://www.netvibes.com/

The RSS reader native to IE7 is crippled – it’s only of use if one is okay with having the screen clipped at the side. I personally hate it, since one has to not only keep it open, but keep opening the sites to see what’s updated. Firefox or Netscape, OTOH, allow you to use your bookmarks toolbar as the staging ground for the RSS sites, so that you can have, say, hotair on the top, and when you click on it, you get a pull-down menu of all the headlines. Do a refresh, and you’ll see the updates.

World of difference.

Like others have stated, if you use Firefox 2, you get the RSS reader built in, which can be staged on the Bookmarks Toolbar, and every feed appears in a nifty pull-down menu. It’s what I normally use.

If you have to use IE, I suggest using Diodia – download the RSS toolbar feeds, and stage it on your browser. After that, go to feeds, and manage which sites you want feeds from, and how many headlines do you want showing up.

Downsides:
- All the feeds appear in a single list, so that if you’ve been subscribing to say, 5 websites, and 1 of them has been updating every few minutes (like hotair), the site that has been updated most frequently and most recently will appear, drowning out the others;
- ATOM format feeds are not supported, and these guys aren’t doing anything new at the moment;

As a result, with IE, you don’t have too many good options. My suggestion – if you aren’t too married to IE, use FireFox 2, or if you prefer, Netscape 9 (which is essentially FireFox 2 but with the Netscape brand, and supports all Firefox extensions excepting Themes).

Hope this helped

Wizz Rss reader for Firefox is very nice as well.

186k on October 10, 2007 at 9:56 PM

I’m a bit clueless sometimes, but I could never actually make Wizz work.

I installed NewsFox as recommended above by AtomicAmish on October 10, 2007 at 8:01 PM and Voila! Cool.

I use FeedReader and have for the past couple of years and have never had an issue. It’s stand-alone, but I like it.

Thanks, Misha. I appreciate it. I’ll try one of the latter two to get my feet wet.

I have never used an RSS feed. I’ve heard all about them, but I don’t understand them. Like I said, I used to be cutting edge, but now I’m sweeping up the elephant dung at the circus

 Basically an RSS feed is used by the reader program and access the content of the blog post.

It grabs only that.  None of the rest of the blog like advertisements , header graphics and all the other clutter.

A very few sites only send the first paragraph or so, but 98% send the whole text of the post on the blog.

Some also offer a seperate RSS feed for the comments on the blog.

By just downloading the text of the blog post it is blazingly fast compared to loading the blog page itself.  Also it means that the amount of information stored on your hard drive is much less.

I follow about 300 blogs and on each 15 minute (my setting of choice I can pick whatever I want) I get about 40 new messages on an average poll of the blogs.

You can easily run through them for a quick scan of content in under a couple minutes.

A much more efficient way of working.

Also with the search and tagging functions you can always find the blog post you were trying to remember where you saw some info on you want to quote as long as you can spec a word or two to search for that is in the post.

For research it can’t be beat.