« Return to: News on Demand
| RSS READER | Price | Atom support1 | Pros | Cons | Comments |
| Bloglines bloglines.com (Web-based subscription) | Free | Yes | * Works with any Web browser and OS * Easy to use * Imports and exports feed lists | * Uncertain future as a free service | Bloglines offers a lot of configuration options for a Web service, and it houses them in a pretty slick site. Helpful features let you search through past postings.  |
| FeedDemon [Editor's Pick]www.bradsoft.com (stand-alone, embedded browser) | $30 | Yes | * Flexible layout * Can filter feeds based on searches * Helps find feeds on pages you're browsing | * Needs better documentation of advanced features * At press time, support forums required a Usenet news reader | Flexible placement of browser window helps on smaller screen. You can group channels and display their headlines on a newspaper, a page controlled by your choice of styles for quick skimming. |
| NewsGator 2 newsgator.com, (Outlook plug-in) | $29 | Yes | * A right-click lets you subscribe to feeds from Internet Explorer * Subscription version lets you check feeds in many more ways | * Outlook integration can be confusing; message windows still have reply buttons | Unmatched add-on capability as part of subscription-based online service, which includes synchronized versions for cell phones, PDAs, and even TV sets (via Windows Media Center Edition).  |
| Pluck RSS Reader www.pluck.com (Explorer sidebar) | Free | Yes | * Customizable update frequency * Clean layout and Add a Feed wizard are beginner-friendly | * Internet Explorer limits options for tweaking the interface * Beta version had problems displaying some blog entries | Pluck plans to pay the bills with PowerSearch features for Amazon and EBay, with more specialized search engines to follow. (Pluck pledges to be spyware- and adware-free.)  |
| Radio Userland radio.userland.com (stand-alone, in-browser editing) | $40 per year | No | * Serves as a blogging tool * Price includes space for a blog * Also works with Netscape, Mozilla * Includes premium feeds | * Bare-bones news reader display * No long-term storage of news feeds * Can't sort new postings by feeds or categories | This reader is showing its age, but its integration of an aggregator and desktop-based Weblog content management tool is hard to beat. Access to New York Times feeds is nice, too.  |
1 Atom is a new format that extends RSS in a number of ways. All readers here support RSS .9, .91, .92, 1.0, and 2.0. See find.pcworld.com/42432 for more on differences between the standards.
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