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Have you ever used an RSS newsreader? Though you can surf to your favorite sites using your Web browser of choice, RSS readers bring all the news to you in a simple format that's conducive to getting more information quickly. The best RSS readers make it easy to add your favorite sites so you can quickly sift through headlines. When you find something of interest, you can often expand the story in an RSS reader or go directly to the site to read more. If you spend a lot of time on the Web, RSS readers are a great way to find the stuff you want without having to load a bunch of Web sites.

RSS readers come in a lot of flavors, including some that are browser plug-ins, others that offer a standalone desktop app, and still others that behave almost like widgets.

KlipFolio offers a unique RSS experience, giving you a personal dashboard that you can customize with news headlines, your favorite blogs, weather feeds, and tons of other information. The program sits on the side of your desktop and it's skinnable so you can customize it to your style.

Sage is a basic RSS feed and news aggregator for Firefox. With this add-on, you can navigate the latest newsfeeds right in your Firefox sidebar. The interface is extremely easy to navigate, with a top panel for headlines and a bottom panel if you want more information about a story. If you're looking for the easiest way to break into RSS, Sage is a good place to start.

RSS Bandit is a standalone reader that has many attractive features, allowing a user to merge news headlines from multiple sources onto a single page, and organize articles based on keyword, read/unread status, and date. The built-in tabbed browser allows you to read a full article and then switch to a different story without closing out the original article. If you like to open and read several stories at once, this is the reader for you.

Snarfer is a top-notch feed reader that will devour your RSS and Atom feeds, but more experienced RSS junkies might find it too basic. An uncomplicated, uncluttered interface follows a generic app design of left-side listed entries with a right-side preview pane. Experienced users will miss customizations like changing fonts and preview pane location, but if you want a simple way to get your news in one place--without an overwhelming amount of settings--Snarfer might be the right choice for you.

FeedDemon is a well-crafted, standalone newsreader that makes for an ideal choice for both novices who've never heard of an RSS feed and advanced users looking to put some oomph and flexibility into their reading habits. FeedDemon also features a Watch Channels option to search for news items containing user-specified keywords and places them in a separate group so they're easier to find. If you're looking for customization and flexibility, FeedDemon delivers.

RSS Captor is an easy-to-use RSS client with a three-pane interface. Feeds are listed on the left, a list of stories on the top right, and details on the lower right. Tabs offer quick access to sections where you can set up folders for automatically saved messages and manually saved messages. RSS Captor excels with its options for sorting, filtering, and searching stories. If you plan on committing yourself to getting all your information via RSS reader, RSS Captor offers a lot to work with.

Some people can get by with using their bookmarks to save their favorite sites. But if you spend a lot of time on the Web and want a way to get the latest news from several sites, any of these programs are up to the task.

Another Yahoo department has cause for concern. Up until last week, Yahoo Go was top dog in the mobile widget arena, pulling everything from weather, news, and finance to local listings, Flickr photos, and search onto Yahoo Go 3.0 beta, the company's rich application for smartphones. But Viigo 3.0 beta has added many of the same elements to what is essentially a faster-loading and more visually straightforward wrapper.

I've sung Viigo's praises when it was flexing new-found muscle as a superb RSS reader for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The new beta, released June 19, still retains its RSS-fetching core, but news is now one tab of nine. Like Yahoo Go, Viigo 3.0 beta will report on sports scores, weather, entertainment, stocks, travel, and local listings.

The resemblance to Yahoo Go's more famous 3.0 beta has not been lost on Viigo CEO Mark Ruddock, who stated in an interview with CNET Download.com that the similarities between the two content programs are more coincidental duplication than deliberate emulation.

"[Viigo's] services reflect the services we believe will initially be the most interesting," Ruddock said. While it's true that Viigo will necessarily have to mirror much of Yahoo's content in order to make it as the "everything" source for mobile data, Viigo's engineers will have to work hard to introduce features that surpass its greatest rivals. "It's the way we will compete with anyone in this space," he added.

More to come
Here's Viigo's vision. First, there's filling in the features laid out in this first beta build, many of which are mere placeholders marked by screenshots of sneak previews. Next come back-end changes that will mash up content for richly integrated data on a results screen. And as always, there's gaining new partnerships with content providers, among them a major music label with whom Viigo would like to offer band and concert information and audio tracks and podcasts. Opening up an XML-based development platform in Q1 is expected to also populate Viigo with content and new functionality.

Until then, Viigo 3.0 beta is in good shape for forging ahead and quite possibly for besting Yahoo Go. The product isn't yet where it ought to be, admits CEO Ruddock. The old RSS mainstay cries out for a visual overhaul to match the new look; the full feature set has yet to be completed; and the home screen demands customization--just ask users wondering why Canadian football deserves to be the third-most valued channel on their reader. That slot obviously belongs to the SPL.

There are several solid newsreaders for Mac OS X including the popular NewsFire and NetNewsWire which I've talked about here before. But I found an application today which puts a different sort of visual spin on the standard newsreader. It's called Times and it organizes feeds in an entirely different, though immediately familiar way. One quick note: this application only works on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Most newsreaders offer a three-paned interface with your feed list on the left, headlines with summaries on the upper right, and full stories (once clicked) in the lower right. What Times does is turn your newsfeeds into a fully customizable newspaper layout. Choose categories like World News, Technology, Science, or Sports at the top, and Times displays the latest newsfeeds of that type, laid out like a newspaper. To add a new feed you can click on the pencil icon in the upper right of the interface to display a list of recommended sites which you can drag onto your page. You also can add feeds to this quick-drag area by clicking on the "+" button to bring up a huge list of topics.

One of the best things about Times is you can create your own page and add feeds based on your favorite sites. I was able to create pages with some of my most frequently visited sites, such as CNET News.com, Engadget, Gizmodo, Digg, and Reddit, and I also created a page with my most viewed politics sites. You have complete control over where your feeds show up, so you might put your favorite site in the featured headline area at the top, while another feed is moved to the sidebar on the right. It's completely up to you.

As an added bonus, Times offers an interesting and useful feature called the Shelf. Clicking on the shelf icon in the upper right (next to the pencil icon) brings up a wood-grained shelf. To get at the news which interests you from each category, simply drag stories onto the shelf to read later. This makes it possible to quickly scan stories from each of the main categories (and your personal pages) to bring your reading list into one place. From there, just click on the pages to read the full page stories.

NewsFire and NetNewsWire are both great ways to get the news on your Mac and you can't beat the price: they're both free. Times might be the coolest way to display your favorite news feeds and create your own new pages, but you'll need to pay $30 to register. Playing around with it has made me seriously consider hitting that purchase now button and, with all of it's flexibility, Times might be worth the extra money.

Killer Download is a new feature on Download.com in which we'll present a new program each week. Most will be free, but some might be good enough that paying a low registration fee is well worth the cost. If you find you have a better option than the software featured, let us know in the comments!

What method do you use to get the news? For a long time, I used my Web browser and grabbed bookmarks when I found good news sites. But before long those bookmarks multiplied, making it difficult to find particular sites; I realized I had to find a way to organize them all. The most obvious method was to continue with a regular Internet browser and put similar sites into folders, calling them "News" and "Blogs" and "Software," or whatever category fit the bill. This method worked fairly well, but I never knew when any of the sites updated without actually going to the site and checking. Naturally, all sites don't update according to a schedule, so I quickly figured out that I needed to try something else.... Read more