I’ve been trying a couple different RSS solutions for a while now. FTR I use iTunes (with all its flaws) for podcasts. Initially I was using Sage an add-on for Firefox. But this didn’t allow me to archive any of my feeds, so I switched to Attensa. Attensa is a great idea because it works inside Outlook to show your RSS feeds in the same you you read email. Problem was it crashed all the time.

I had played with Google Reader when it was first launched but it wasn’t really a full featured product initially. Fortunately that’s not true any more. Google Reader like every Google product I have used regularly (maps, world, Picasa, gmail, talk) is improved substantially. For one the simple ability to organize feeds by category and then access all of the feeds within a specific category is a must. This is important because I have over a hundred RSS feeds I track and having the ability to read quickly read through all of the feeds in a specific category or topic is key for me. Not only that but by installing Greasemonkey in Firefox and then using this script you can access all of your RSS fees from within your gmail page. Awesome. The only thing missing was an archive system since this was all online. But Google you have come through yet again. Google Gears allows you to synchronize up to 2000 entries in an offline archive. Perfect.

BTW You can also access previews of both gmail and Google Reader from the google home page if you use the iGoogle personalized page.