By aggregator, I mean a feed reader that allows you to see all the news items. For a simple example, let’s say you need to keep up with, say, medical news. You put all of the feeds you want in one folder, and then you can see them all together when reading the whole folder – all in one list, that is. This is very handy and time saving when you have that kind of need. Programs like Sharpreader, Feedreader, RSS Bandit, etc. allow you to do this. Browsers don’t, and so they are next to useless for this.

Personally, I think that if you’re only going to check out your feeds one feed at a time, you don’t gain much over just going to the websites where those feeds originate. This is just using a feed reader as a kind of bookmark system, as opposed to a real feed aggregator.

I’ve used Liferea (on Linux), Sharpreader, Feedreader and RSS Bandit myself, as well as the Firefox add-ons Sage, Wiz, Newsfox and Brief.

My personal favourite is Feedreader, but I also like Sharpreader. They are both very similar in their simplicity and effectiveness, but as of right now (April 2008), Feedreader is more current, while Sharpreader almost seems abandoned. I really could live with any of them, though. I like both Sage and Newsfox, but I can’t be committed to using just one browser at the moment.

With both, however, I must gripe about the lack of a drag-and-drop style interface for folders/tags. There may be tools that could help with this, but either comes out-of-the box with the capability.

As I am constantly trying to tweak and reorganize my feeds, drag-and-drop would be enoramously helpful

Also what I like about it is you can create customisable “views” such as “unread items this month” which lists all new items in the month.

The main feature that makes me use it is that you can set some feeds so that when you click the headline it opens the actual web page of the blog in the application which is extremely useful for blogs that don’t include full text in their feeds.